Across the River and Into the Trees

By Ernest Hemingway

In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. A poignant, bittersweet homage to love that overpowers reason, to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the worldweary beauty and majesty of Venice, Across the River and into the Trees stands as Hemingway's statement of defiance in response to the great dehumanizing atrocities of the Second World War. Hemingway's last full-length novel published in his lifetime, it moved John O'Hara in The New York Times Book Review to call him “the most important author since Shakespeare.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: May 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781476770031

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961. 

Reviews for Across the River and Into the Trees

[alphawoman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reminds me of many things that have followed. Such as Before Sunrise and the Anonymous Venetian. Fluid writing and effortless dialog though most references went over my head. Hemingway writing from heart, experiences, regrets, sorrows, and sadness.

[bareretz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book a couple of years ago and have since considered it as one of Hemingway's masterpeices. Thinking about the book again I was surprised to find how many people hated it or at best thought it was average. More than that I haven't found anyone who understood the book in the way that I understood it, so perhaps I'm the one who's wrong, but this is how I always viewed the book.

The book is about a man who lead a crappy life mostly because he always was crappy to everyone around. In his eyes he was good having given over his life to the military and fighting in two world wars. But after giving all of that the army demoted him, an act which haunts him, and he now has been shunted to a desk job while he tries to maintain some sort of the dignity he thinks he should have. He is pulling toward the end of his life and he has nothing, his marriage ended long before, the army has no use for him and he knows it, no kids, no friends. He goes to the one place he thinks he's wanted, Venice, and reminisces with old "friends". These friends however are at best acquaintances from long past, but in reality are people who are nice to him because that's their job, but he can't see the difference because he does want to confront that last ugly truth. The big "love" affair is an absurd joke, he has to keep saying he loves her and she he so he can attempt to convince himself its true, but its obvious that what he has with her isn't close to the actual love that he has missed out on his entire life. So here he is a man whose facade of toughness and acceptance has long crumbled away running to the one place that if he tries really hard he can convince himself it's true. Venice of course is the perfect setting as so but about the place has to do with facades and masks and truth hidden by water. This is a story about a feeble attempt to arrange a ones own life story in such a way that he can be less of a failure in the eyes of himself, and failing. It's about dying unloved and forgotten but wishing it wasn't true.

Seen from this all of the sloppy dialogue isn't a failure of Hemingway but rather the characters failure. The absurdness of the love story is just that, absurd. The book as written is the perspective of the main character a crappy story that doesn't hold water under scrutiny. Hemingway wrote that this book is calculus compared to algebra, Hemingway didn't write the real story he was telling, he wrote a fake story who very flaws tell the real one. He wrote a book about a man's entire life, by relating how that man saw his last day.

[elizabeth_foster-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When I first picked this up I almost put it straight back down. The main character, Colonel Cantwell, was shooting ducks, and the exquisite description of their flight and freedom, interspersed with their violent descent to earth, was a brutal juxtaposition. But I read on, lured by the setting: Venice. This story has been widely panned for its prose and lack of plot but this is Hemingway at his most honest, reflecting on the inhumanity of war and dealing with his ageing body and failing health.

In Across The River and Into the Trees, the fifty-year-old protagonist tries to come to terms with his past as a soldier in a city that couldn’t be more different than the war zone. The beauty and tranquillity of Venice is reflected in the personality of Renata, the Colonel’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend. The story oozes with the atmosphere of post-war Venice, with the Colonel staying at the Gritti Palace and frequenting the now-famous Harry’s Bar.

I couldn’t help but draw parallels with Hemingway’s real life, and that’s when I started to connect to the story more. Hemingway as an older man was infatuated with a girl of nineteen while staying in Venice. Rather than reading Renata’s character as a fantasy, I saw her as a mirror of Hemingway himself, a way to explore the youth and innocence he felt he had lost. Hemingway first went to war at eighteen, and then spent the rest of his life chasing death, through war or safaris. How do we make up for such loss of youth and idealism – where do we even start? This is a novel full of unspoken questions such as these, winding through the story like the canals that meander through Venice itself.

The Colonel switches between soldier and lover over and over again, telling himself to be better, failing, then trying once more, as he attempts to come to some understanding of the motives and urges he has carried with him all his life. Much of the story is a recount of the vicissitudes of war. Death is everywhere in this book. Killing has been the Colonel’s ‘trade’ and in a way it was Hemingway’s too – it forms the subject of many of his stories. In the end the ducks are shot again, their helpless eyes looking into his. After reading the Colonel's recounts of the horrors of war I saw, with fresh eyes, why such a scene was so brutally rendered.

[cheryl_in_cc_nv · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I didn't understand any of the situation or the allusions. I didn't sympathize with the characters. I didn't understand the point of the story. Sorry.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A tale of a conversation between an American Colonel and his Italian. girlfriend. I drew some conclusions.

[artymedon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece. It does reach into your comfort zone hence a lot of negative written and said about this book. A meditation on life and death in the refined background of Venice's waterfront. If Lucchino Visconti was still with us, he may have had a shot at this one though the heroe of this book would not have been his typical character as if the "Gattopardo" would have chosen to die in Venice's Harris Bar where I doubt they would play Mahler.

[fuzzy_patters · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a good book, but it isn't great by Hemingway standards. Hemingway's greatest strengths lie in writing honestly and in portraying tragedies. The writing here is very open and honest, but the tragedy is mitigated by the fact that there is only one way for the story to end. It lacks the punch at the end that some of his other novels had.

[plumberti · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not one of my favorites. Kept my interest at first because of the detail and history he gives of the city. Book seemed to drag on a bit and I seemed to lose interest around the middle of the book. It seemed there was 150 pages of them just eating and saying 'I love you' over and over again. The ending was nice, especially his explanation of the title. Not bad but there are bette rHemingway books out there.

[splagentsdandj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As a long time Hemingway enthusiast, Across The River was one of the few of his works I hadn't read at the time. I was a little disappointed by the pace and depth compared to earlier works. Compared to The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast or even Death In The Afternoon, Across The River plods along lacking energy. But perhaps that reflects the disposition of the author as much as the the main character, both of whom are navigating the late years of a full and sometimes brutal life. This book will forever hold special meaning for me personally, however, as the reading of it was shared with my own Countess - MY last and only true love. --SA Justus

[jbreedlove_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A story about a cynical American officer and his affair for an Italian countess in post-WWII Italy. A banal subject is brought to wondrous life by a great author.