You definitely shouldn’t put The Garden of Eden on the back-burner in favour of Hemingway’s more famous works. The novel was published posthumously in a much-abridged form in 1986. Hemingway began The Garden of Eden in 1946 and wrote 800 pages. For 15 years, he continued to work on the novel which remained uncompleted. During that time he also wrote The Old Man and the Sea, The Dangerous Summer, A Moveable Feast, and Islands in the Stream. The Garden of Eden indicates Hemingway's exploration of male-female relationships, shows an interest in androgynous characters, and "the reversal of gender roles." Set on the French Riviera in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine. David and Catherine spend most of their days in the Edenic setting eating fine food, making love, swimming, riding bikes, fishing, and drinking. But suddenly the dangerous and erotic game starts when they fall in love with the same woman. The Garden of Eden confronts sexual intimacy, marriage, and human androgyny with a wary but searching tenderness that amounts, for a man so wrapped up in masculine values and public gestures, to courage. Hemingway’s technique throughout the novel is to present the phenomenological contours of a heady world. Reading this book, modern readers are frequently reminded that the past is indeed another country. Enjoy free online English audiobook “The Garden of Eden”, the second posthumously released novel by Ernest Hemingway.
