Autumn in Venice
Description
The illuminating story of writer and muse—which also examines the cost to a young woman of her association with a larger-than-life literary celebrity—Autumn in Venice is an intimate look at Hemingway’s final years.
In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife traveled for the first time to Venice, which Hemingway called “absolutely god-damned wonderful.” A year shy of his fiftieth birthday, Hemingway hadn’t published a novel in nearly a decade when he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. Here Andrea di Robilant re-creates with sparkling clarity this surprising, years-long relationship, during which Adriana inspired a man thirty years her senior to complete his great final work.
Hemingway used Adriana as the model for Renata in Across the River and into the Trees, and continued to visit Venice to see her; when the Ivanciches traveled to Cuba, Adriana was there as he wrote The Old Man and the Sea.
Praise for Autumn in Venice
“Di Robilant captures the full panoply of [Hemingway’s] quirks and conflicts.” —The Washington Post
“A saga that grips and enthralls from start to finish.” —The Times (London)
“[Autumn in Venice] reads like a novel, not a biography, and avid readers, of any genre, should secure a copy.” —Idaho Statesman
“Rich with new material, some based on Italian sources, di Robilant’s lively and affecting double portrait brings a fresh perspective to the much-examined life of an all-too-human writer.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Autumn in Venice effortlessly and expertly explores the secret desires, successes, and depressive obstacles that shrouded Ernest Hemingway’s final productive years. . . . [A] methodically researched account.” —The New York Journal of Books
“A sensitive recounting of a writer’s doomed fantasy.” —Kirkus Reviews
“One of the most wrenching and scandalous love stories in all of literary biography. . . . What emerges is an ample, finely detailed fresco of the last stage of Hemingway’s life, a kaleidoscopic succession of relationships, passions, trips, editorial disputes, drinking binges, set against the backdrop of northeast Italy. . . . [Autumn in Venice] has all the intrigue and emotion of a novel.” —Il Piccolo (Italy)
“Di Robilant’s portrait is of a once-great writer getting ‘awfully dreggy at the end’—like the two bottles of Valpolicella that he took to bed each night.” —The Spectator
“An evocative and alluring tale of love and death.” —La Stampa (Italy)