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This is not a review or a spoiler, though I will do both of those if you have or have not read this book...

I wrote my worst essay in college on The Garden of Eden for Honors Freshman English, because when I went to write, I didn't know what to say. I loved the story, the tone, the settings, the simple way it was put together to address complexities. And I couldn't write about it.

The Garden of Eden is my favorite Hemingway novel. I haven't read them all [yet], but I think he's at his best in the novel:

...The hell with tomorrow. What a way to be. Tomorrow. Go in and start it now.

He put the note and the key in his pocket and went back into the work room and sat down and wrote the first paragraph of the new story that he had always put off writing since he had known what a story it was. He wrote it in simple declarative sentences with all of the problems ahead to be lived through and made to come alive. The very beginning was written and all he had ot do was go on. That's all, he said. You see how simple what you cannot do is? Then he came out onto the terrace and sat down and ordered a whiskey and Perrier. (108)

Catherine is absolutely alluring in the first pages, and you just want to tell David to stay the hell away from her while he can:

"Don't say it. I'm getting hungry already and we haven't finished breakfast"

"We can think about lunch."

"And then after lunch?"

"We'll take a nap like good children."

"That's an absolutely new idea," she said. "Why have we never thought of that?"

"I have these flashes of intuition," he said. "I'm the inventive type."

"I'm the destructive type," she said. "And I'm going to destroy you. They'll put a plaque up on the wall of the building outside the room. I'm going to wake up in the night and do something to you that you've never even heard of or imagined. I was going to last night but I was too sleepy." (5)

The strain between David and Catherine lives in their conversation, and I learned to [do my best to] write tense dialogue from The Garden of Eden:

"Who is the third drink for?"

"Marita."

"Your paramour?"

"You really said it," David said. "I'd never heard that word pronounced and I had absolutely no hope of ever hearing it in this life. You're really wonderful."

"It's a perfectly common word."

"It is at that," David said." But to have the sheer, naked courage to use it in conversation. Devil, be good now..." (155)

The novel deals with several threads, among them the loss of innocence. The death of innocence in the relationship between David and Catherine is complemented in touches like the green children's cahiers in which David writes, and the passages from David's story about elephant hunting in Africa with his father and his friend. He hates the elephant hunting, and Hemingway makes you hate it, too, while respecting the methods of the hunt. Young David wants to avenge the death of the elephant's friend, and the tone is empathetic to the boy's quiet lashing:

I care, David thought. I saw him in the moonlight and he was alone but I had Kibo. Kibo has me too. The bull wasn't doing anyone harm and now we've tracked him to where he came to see his dead friend and now we're going to kill him. It's my fault. I betrayed him.

Now Juma had worked out the trail and motioned to his father and they started on.

My father doesn't need to kill elephants to live, David thought. Juma would not have found him if I had not seen him. He had his chance at him and all he did was wound him and kill his friend. Kibo and I found him and I never should have told them and I should have kept him secret and had him always and let them stay drunk with their bibis at the beer shamba. Juma was so drunk we could not wake him. I'm going to keep everything a secret always. I'll never tell them anything again. If they kill him Juma will drink his share of the ivory or just buy himself another god damn wife. Why didn't you help the elephant when you could? All you had to do was not go on the second day. No, that wouldn't have stopped them. Juma would have gone on. You should never have told them. Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again. (181)

Ernest Hemingway was the one who taught me how to steal from Ernest Hemingway:

Thank God he was breaking through on the stories now. What had made the last book good was the people who were in it and the accuracy of the detail which made it believable. He had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out. Then, of course, he could close it like the diaphragm of a camera and intensify it so it could be concentrated to the point where the heat shone bright and the smoke began to rise. He knew that he was getting this now. (211)

David Bourne is not ruined. He fell in love and married a really unstable, dangerous woman. Catherine could not handle being married to a writer. She kept trying to create herself as a boy and create him in her image. They are ruined like that.

David loves Marita because of his support for his writing. She says she isn't going to share him like Catherine did, but she was part of that, too, and I think David knows what this means. I think David really loves Catherine and appreciated Marita's enthusiasm and honest support for his writing. Her support seems honest, at least, but I don't know that.

David eats eggs at the beginning and the end of the novel, so something new is born; He is still fertile as a writer. That's what saves him from his ruined relationship.

I don't understand Madame Aurol's black eye at the end. Something happens with Monsieur Aurol that I must have missed this time. But it's okay. I love this fucking book. But A Farewell to Arms is my favorite, too, and I think I might read that next.