Watched Garden of Eden recently and it made me want to read the book. While looking around found this review by John Updike which made for excellent reading. He gets to the heart of the matter rather quickly once he starts to opine on the book at hand:
In the trim published text of sixty-five thousand words, a daily repetition of actions remains (wake, write, drink, lunch, siesta, drink, eat, make love, sleep), but the dialogue never covers exactly the same ground and the plot advances by steady, subliminal increments, as situations in real life do. The basic tensions of the slender, three-cornered action are skillfully sustained. The psychological deterioration of the heroine, Catherine Bourne, the professional preoccupations of the hero, the young writer David Bourne, and the growing involvement of the other woman, Marita, are kept in the fore, interwoven with but never smothered by Hemingway’s betranced descriptions of the weather, the meals, the landscape, the chronic recreations.
That was how the movie felt too. Like clockwork the characters repeat the aforementioned set of activities day after day. Yet, things fall apart within that steady beat. The way the unravelling is depicted one small crack at a time is masterful. I love Updike's depiction of Catherine as a "feral female" which is exactly the feeling the character invokes. That description stuck with me for some reason and made me think about how some people I grew up with have transformed into versions of themselves that are unrecognizable to those who knew them as children. At least two of them have moved to the "feral" end of the change spectrum.
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