A Last Love Measured Against War
5 stars
Across the River and into the Trees felt to me like Ernest Hemingway’s attempt to look directly at decline without abandoning beauty. The novel follows Colonel Richard Cantwell during his final days in Venice, where he revisits memories of war, failure, and love. Its pace is quiet, but the silence is never empty. Every meal, canal, and conversation seems to carry the weight of time running out.
Cantwell can be difficult to like. He is proud, wounded, and intensely aware of his own history. He returns again and again to past battles, military errors, and the soldiers he could not save. At times, his voice made me impatient because he seems unable to leave his own legend behind. Yet Hemingway does not present that self-absorption as heroic. It becomes part of the Colonel’s sadness, because he has built an identity that cannot easily survive the loss of command, health, …
Across the River and into the Trees felt to me like Ernest Hemingway’s attempt to look directly at decline without abandoning beauty. The novel follows Colonel Richard Cantwell during his final days in Venice, where he revisits memories of war, failure, and love. Its pace is quiet, but the silence is never empty. Every meal, canal, and conversation seems to carry the weight of time running out.
Cantwell can be difficult to like. He is proud, wounded, and intensely aware of his own history. He returns again and again to past battles, military errors, and the soldiers he could not save. At times, his voice made me impatient because he seems unable to leave his own legend behind. Yet Hemingway does not present that self-absorption as heroic. It becomes part of the Colonel’s sadness, because he has built an identity that cannot easily survive the loss of command, health, and youth.
His relationship with Renata gives the novel its tenderness. She is much younger than he is, but she is not merely a symbol of lost youth. Renata listens, challenges him, and shares a private language with him that allows moments of genuine warmth. Their love remains inseparable from the knowledge that it cannot become an ordinary future. I found their scenes in Venice moving when they stayed restrained, especially because Hemingway lets affection appear through small gestures rather than large declarations.
Venice itself matters deeply. The city offers water, fading palaces, winter light, and a sense of beauty already touched by disappearance. Hemingway uses it less as a postcard than as a setting where Cantwell’s memories can surface. The canals seem to slow time, while the lagoon and the hunting scenes remind him that the body still seeks action even when it is weakening.
The prose is spare, but the dialogue often circles around what cannot be said. Cantwell speaks in jokes, military language, and repeated phrases. Renata sometimes answers with a directness that exposes his evasions. This repetition can feel mannered, yet it also captures a man trying to preserve control through language when control is slipping away elsewhere.
By the end, Across the River and into the Trees left me with a more intimate impression than I expected. It is not Hemingway at his most expansive, but its vulnerability stayed with me. The novel asks what remains when courage is no longer useful as a public role and must become a private way of facing mortality. For me, its strongest moments come from that quiet acceptance