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Three
weeks after Hemingway's death in 1961, his widow traveled to
Cuba for his literary remains.... Charles Scribner Jr. has
described her arrival in the office, carrying a large shopping
bag bulging with unpublished material.... It was merely
a matter of time and editorial ingenuity before the shopping
bag
was published. With the
exception of the cameo which a skillful editor named Tom Jenks
shaped out of The Garden of Eden, we do not turn to these "posthumous
works" for
any of the pleasures of art.... Of The
Garden of Eden we know, although not from Scribner's, that
it existed as some 2,400 pages, out of which Tom Jenks created
a comely and absorbing novel of 247 pages. As we are told
by a scholar who has examined the manuscript, it is "often more
reiterative than cumulative, containing immense repetition that
Hemingway seems to have been unable to control, and there is
often little evidence among the variants that he privileged one
text over another." Seems to have been unable to control is
a chilling phrase.
But
Jenks has performed a dazzling feat. The published text
glows with language to bring to mind Hemingway at his best,
tense with the excitement of narrative clarity yet hinting
at mysteries just below the skin of the prose.
— Thomas Flanagan (October 21, 1999)
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