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ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES

Name: ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES
Author: Ernest Hemingway
ISBN: 0684825538

by Ernest Hemingway ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1960

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As Hemingway's first in ten years, this has a waiting and eager audience, but this reader, at any rate, found the novel a bitter disappointment after his For Whom The Bell Tolls The magic of the Hemingway atmosphere- this time Venice and the countryside and early morning in a duck blind — this is still here. And stark against it is an American Colonel, seeking to recapture the glamor of the Venice he knew in World War I, torn by hatred and disillusion, aware that his life is ebbing fast, his semblance of physical fitness an illusion produced by drugs that fooled even the medical officer, and yet clutching at the drama of first one thing, then another — the adventure in the duck blind — the greater and more tenuous adventure of a love freely given. The pattern is there for another Farewell to Arms but the development has an acidity, a cruelty, a harshness that robs it of even a shadow of illusion or appeal on an emotional level. Frankly, I found it difficult reading. There's crassness, lack of subtlety, needless vulgarity in the content, while the style has the erratic abruptness, elisions, and awkwardness that characterizes Hemingway at his least successful..... The promotion will send this off with a bang; the serialization should not be a vital consideration, as the novel has been almost rewritten since that text. Extensive advertising.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1960

ISBN: 0684825538

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1950

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LETTERS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
by Ernest Hemingway & edited by Verna Kale ; Sandra Spanier & Miriam B. Mandel

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAR PAPA
by Ernest Hemingway with Patrick Hemingway ; edited by Brendan Hemingway & Stephen Adams

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
by Ernest Hemingway ; edited by Seán Hemingway

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New Hemingway Film Adaptation in Works

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THE BLUEST EYE

by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1970

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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970

ISBN: 0375411550

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
RECITATIF
by Toni Morrison

- BOOK REVIEW
GOODNESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION
by Toni Morrison edited by David Carrasco Stephanie Paulsell Mara Willard

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD
by Toni Morrison

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.