Review of Autumn in Venice by Andrea di Robilant

Author: Andrea di Robilant

Release date: June 5, 2018

Publisher: AA Knopf

Pages: 352

Buy from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Autumn-Venice-Ernest-Hemingway-Last/dp/1101946652/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1528837601&sr=8-1&keywords=autumn+in+venice

In the fall of 1948 Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary traveled to Europe, staying in Venice for a few months. He was a year shy of his 50th birthday and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. During a hunting expedition he met and fell in love with 18-year-old, Adriana Ivancich, a strikingly beautiful Venetian girl just out of finishing school.

“Lovely, seductive, mischievous Adriana became Hemingway’s muse in the most classical sense. She brought joy to his life, inspired him, made him feel young again . . . her presence helped to fill the dried-up well of his creative juices, leading to a remarkable literary flowering in the late season of his life.”

It has been alleged that he used her as the model for Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees and that she traveled to Cuba to see him as he wrote, The Old Man and the Sea. Nearly six decades after Hemingway’s suicide, Andrea di Robilant attempts to reconstruct this rarely written about and mysterious relationship in his new book, Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and his Last Muse. Robilant is the author of several books that include A Venetian Affair (2005), Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon (2008), and Chasing the Rose: An Adventure in the Venetian Countryside (2014). The author claims that his great uncle was part of Hemingway’s social circle in Venice.

Generally regarded as past his prime, Hemingway at the time had been suffering from writer’s block and hadn’t published a book in nearly a decade. One day, he is introduced to Adriana Ivancich and is immediately smitten with the naïvely attractive young woman. According to the author, this relationship “took over his life” and she became his muse. They spent countless hours together in Venice and Cuba, all under the watchful eye of Hemingway’s wife. Meeting his muse around town, Hemingway seemed unaware of the nasty chatter he was generating for Adriana. While his wife, Mary was tolerant of his crush as long as it remained nonsexual and it made him happy.

In this methodically researched account of Ernest Hemingway’s obsession with a much younger woman, Robilant draws heavily on previously unpublished letters and journals. He alleges that this relationship helped to produce some of Hemingway’s best works including The Old Man and The Sea, stating “Adriana made all this possible . . . No question in my mind, she revived Hemingway’s writing.”

Autumn in Venice effortlessly and expertly explores the secret desires, successes, and depressive obstacles that shrouded Ernest Hemingway’s final productive years. It ultimately falls short of fully answering the basic premise of whether or not Hemingway and Ivancich’s relationship remained purely platonic. In the end, Robilant does succeed in acknowledging that the malicious rumors of the affair did severely impact Adriana and because of such treatment (fairly or unfairly), she suffered years of depression that ultimately led to her own suicide.

Michael Thomas Barry is a staff reviewer for the New York Journal of Books and the author of eight nonfiction books.

Review first appeared at the New York Journal of Books on June 11, 2018 - https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/autumn-venice

Review of "The Ambulance Drivers" by James McGrath Morris

This review first appeared at the New York Journal of Books on March 27, 2017 http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/ambulance-drivers

The book can be purchased from Amazon through the following link: https://www.amazon.com/Ambulance-Drivers-Hemingway-Passos-Friendship/dp/0306823837/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490972030&sr=8-1&keywords=the+ambulance+drivers

“Paris represented everything their homeland was not for the generation of Americans writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos who had come of age during the Great War. An incomprehensible number of men, more than 9 million, had been killed, and twice that number had been maimed. It seemed to these young aspiring writers . . .the world was no longer the same and never would be again.”

John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway initially crossed paths in 1918 as ambulance drivers in war torn Italy. The two literary icons would met again in the early 1920s in the American expatriate society of Paris where the allure of the city had seduced many writers, artists, and composers. By this time, Dos Passos was already an established author and highly respected, while Hemingway was still an up and comer on the brink of greatness. Throughout the 1920s and better part of the 1930s they were best of friends and honest critics of each other’s works.

“John Dos Passos was one of the few people at certain times whom Ernest could really talk to” and “Their nascent friendship rose out of a unique common bond . . . they dreamed of penning the great books of their generation. They were almost alone among American writers of their age in having witnessed the war that defined their generation.”

Although these two former Chicagoans had many things in common on the surface, they were complete opposites as far as philosophy and temperament. Hemingway was arrogant, certain of himself, willing to get ahead at the expense of others, and athletic. Dos Passos was well educated, timid, considerate to a fault, and not an athlete.

By the mid-1930s, their relationship began to deteriorate. Hemingway became more obsessive about his writing and even more self-centered in his relationships. Dos Passos, who was busy with his own writing was inattentive to Hemingway. The latter’s egoistical selfishness to friends was worsened by his almost total lack of social awareness, his preoccupation with the horrors of war, and his own self-destructive psychoses.

Tiny incidents accumulated to an intolerable level, at least in Hemingway’s mind, and he began to lash out at his baffled friend. The ultimate breaking point, however, came in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway and Dos Passos were in Spain, when José Robles a patriot in the leftist Popular Front and good friend of Dos Passos disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The Hemingway-Dos Passos relationship finally reached its endgame on April 22, 1937, when Hemingway, brimming with confidence and cruelty, told Dos Passos that Robles had been shot as a proven fascist collaborator, a renegade, a dirty spy, a betrayer of his friends. Dos Passos was left shocked and devastated. Their friendship never recovered.

James McGrath Morris, the author of several critically acclaimed biographies, including the New York Times bestselling Eye on the Struggle and Pulitzer delves head first into the mercurial relationship of these two American literary legends in his new book, The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War.

Throughout this riveting biography Morris expertly narrates the journeys, relationships, and life-changing events that inspired two of the greatest authors of the 20th century. While Hemingway believed that literature should be a perfect representation of an imperfect world, Dos Passos wanted his writing to change the world. Both versions played a significant role in shaping what would become the voice of the Lost Generation.

The Ambulance Drivers is a lively and engaging biography that takes a fresh look at the life of Dos Passos, but fails to shed any new light into Hemingway, whose life has already been well documented. Although readers may at first hesitate to embark on yet another analysis of Ernest Hemingway, Morris’ framing of the context of his fragile and contemptuous relationship with fellow literary giant John Dos Passos creates a worthwhile read. It will most certainly fascinate Dos Passos and Hemingway aficionados, as well as the casual literary biography enthusiast.

Michael Thomas Barry is the author of seven nonfiction books that includes America’s Literary Legends: The Lives & Burial Places of 50 Great Writers.

The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris

Rating:

Author: Shaun Harris

Release: July 18, 2016

Publisher: Seventh Street Books

Pages: 240

Genre: Fiction, Historical Thriller, Humor

Buy from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Hemingway-Thief-Shaun-Harris/dp/163388175X

In early December 1922, Ernest Hemingway was in Switzerland on assignment as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, covering the Lausanne Peace Conference. The journalist and editor Lincoln Steffens was also there. Apparently, Steffens was impressed with Hemingway’s writing and asked to see more.

Hemingway cabled his wife, Hadley in Paris and asked her to bring all of his writings to Switzerland. She quickly packed all of his fiction and poetry, including carbon copies that she could find and hurried off to Gare de Lyon train station. At the station, she got a porter to carry her luggage to the train compartment. During the very brief period when the bags were out of sight, the valise with the manuscripts was stolen.

So what did the thief do with the valise once he realized it only contained the scribblings of an unknown writer? Did he throw it into the Seine? Burn them? Hide them away in an attic? Or is there a more provocative and unforeseen twist? Of course, this is one of literatures great mysteries, these lost manuscripts of one of America’s greatest authors that today would be worth more than their weight in gold. But what if they did survive? Shaun Harris tackles this literary “what if” in his debut novel The Hemingway Thief.

Henry “Coop” Cooper is a successful but discontented romance novelist who is questioning the trajectory of his career. He yearns to become a serious writer and is in need of a jumpstart that will propel his literary credibility.

To clear his mind he’s taken refuge at a low budget beach resort in Baja, Mexico, where he befriends the motel’s eccentric owner, Grady Doyle. The duo soon become entangled in a deadly escapade involving the theft of Ernest Hemingway’s original manuscript to A Moveable Feast, a rare piece of literary history that reveals provocative and unpublished clues to the possible location of a suitcase which contains a treasure trove of the author’s early unpublished works that were stolen in 1922.
In this suspense filled and surprisingly humorous novel of cat and mouse, Coop and company trek across the cartel-laden Sierra Madre in a ramshackle RV in search of Hemingway’s fabled suitcase, finding themselves out of their element at every turn. For Coop this experience could become the storyline of a book of a lifetime . . . that is if he can live long enough to write it.

On a whole the plot construction of this south-of-the-border historical themed thriller was a little silly and occasionally confusing, although it most certainly was not predictable, which is always a pleasant surprise with a debut novel.

The story is filled with stereotypical crime thriller type characters, which is not a bad thing. The overall tone of sarcasm of the good guy protagonists Coop, Grady, and their cohorts (who are always ready with a witty wisecrack), reveal them to be more smart alecky than tough guys was a little bit over the top. Many readers will find the bloodthirstiness of antagonist, Newton Thandy, a conman, gunrunner, and rare book collector to be particularly unique and entertaining given that these “vocations” normally don’t coexist.

On a whole the narrative moves swiftly along and is filled with numerous comical and poignant pop culture references. The premise of the book is quite exceptional, a blend of literary history and suspense, mixed with a pinch of comedy, buddy adventure, and crime thriller. Overall, The Hemingway Thief is a quick and worthwhile read for anyone interested in an amusing crime thriller or anything relating to Ernest Hemingway.

Michael Thomas Barry is a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books and is the author of seven nonfiction books. His most recent book is In the Company of Evil: Thirty Years of California Crime, 1950–1980. Michael is also a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com.

https://www.amazon.com/Company-Thirty-Years-California-1950-1980/dp/076435003X

The original review appeared at the New York Journal of Books website on July 18, 2016 and can be found at the following link: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/hemingway-thief