“The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity, that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that truth will ultimately be known, that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge, and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap.

This amazing novel looks at the period of Ernest Hemingway’s breakup with his first wife Hadley in Paris. In terms of biographical history, it overlaps with A Moveable Feast and goes beyond it in fiction to his marriage to his second wife, Pauline. It’s the story of a man who is in love with two women, one is his wife and the other is a woman set on destroying a marriage and claiming the man for her husband. The book is strangely erotic and offers up various interpretations of gender issues.  Hemingway said the book’s theme was “the [ideal] happiness of the Garden that a man must lose.”

This was my third or fourth reading of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Anyone who criticizes any of Hemingway’s books is confronted with the need to tell it like it is: One side of Hemingway’s character was fatally flawed. He would be a hell of a handful to put up with. Many people tried and failed. On the other hand,  the man was a genius of style and deserves all the plaudits that can be bestowed on him for his courage in dealing with a life where he was blessed with genius and burdened with immaturity, fear and some DNA that is still be analyzed to determine what made him who he was. The story of his rise to mythological standing is of itself a one-of-its-kind tale.

  This memoir of his early life in Paris contains numerous cringe-worthy stories that underscore the nasty asides and venom that besmirch the many beautiful passages that make for a touching but tragic love story that haunted Hemingway for the rest of his life. The book reveals the problem Hemingway had: He was chronically unable to give other writers breathing space. If they were dead they could be exempted. If they were alive and competitors, they must be cut down to at least one grade below Hemingway and stained with some unsightly flaw.

One amazing fact: Hemingway acknowledged his character flaws but could never rise above them.

  For my taste and interest at this stage of my life, Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream is of much greater interest to me than his fiction.  Hemingway’s non- fiction, while he labeled it [my words] a fictionalization of Truth, carries the weight of his trademark esthetic style combined with an adroit juxtaposition of the biographical elements of his life, all embedded in three novelas called Bimini, Cuba, and At Sea.

Bimini was Hemingway’s first home in the Gulf Stream, which for decades played an important role in his search for worldclass sport.