The Garden of Eden

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.”

 

My take on this book is that it is an essential key in the understanding of Hemingway’s struggle to absorb the pivotal events of his early life and marriage. I believe he never reconciled the events around his love of two women at the same time.

  The tragedy of The Garden of Eden is the Truth that everything is doomed to be lost: Life itself is a two sided sword: a potential ideal that is destined to be lost — nothing last, and it’s a true tragedy in everyone’s life.

  Such themes are not overtly dwelled upon by Hemingway and the dictum : “What you leave out of a story is as important as what you leave in” applies here.

Hemingway leaves readers with a mesmerizing look at the perils of love and the challenges of living a life without tragedy.