Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1950, after first being serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine earlier that year.
Hemingway's novel opens with Colonel Richard Cantwell, a 50-year-old US Army officer, duck hunting near Venice, Italy at the close of World War II.
Most of the novel takes the form of a lengthy flashback, detailing his experiences in the Italian Front during World War I through the days leading up to the duck hunt.
The bulk of the narrative deals with his star-crossed romance with a Venetian woman named Renata, who is more than thirty years his junior.
One biographer and critic sees a parallel between Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.
J. Donald Adams writing in The New York Times, described it as “one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end”.
The first chapter of Across the River and Into the Trees begins with a frame story depicting 50-year-old Colonel Richard Cantwell duck hunting in the Marano Lagoon, between Venice and Trieste in the present, taking place during the closing days of World War II.
The novel ends with Cantwell suffering a fatal series of heart attacks as he leaves Venice after the duck hunt, on the same day as the book began.
Shortly before dying, the Colonel recounts to his driver Stonewall Jackson's last words, from which the novel draws its name: "No, no, let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees."
The final scene shows the driver reading a note the Colonel had given him, indicating that his belongings should be given to their "rightful owner", Renata.
[10] Adriana Ivancich designed the dust jacket of the first edition, although her original artwork was redrawn by the Scribner's promotions department.
[14] The style is known as the Iceberg Theory because in Hemingway's writing the hard facts float above water; the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight.
"[17] Across the River and into the Trees is constructed so that time is seemingly compressed and differentiated between present and past – as one critic says, "memory and space-time coalesce.
[17] Cantwell, a 50-year-old military officer in love with the teenaged Renata, (whose name means "reborn"), is shown unlikeable as a character; one critic writes of him that his "lovemaking is described in terms of an infantry attack over difficult terrain".
[10] Baker sees a thematic parallel between Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Across the River and into the Trees, presented in a series of commonalities and differences.
[20] Hemingway added yet another layer in the characterization: 50-year-old Cantwell in his dying day is "in an intense state of awareness" of his younger self of 1918 to the point that meld – yet retain the differences wrought by time.
[21] Charles Oliver writes the novel shows a central Hemingway theme of "maintaining control over one's life, even in the face of terrible odds."
[22] Jackson Benson writes that how a writer transforms biographical events into art is more important than looking for connections between Hemingway's life and his fiction.
"[25] Hemingway himself stated that Cantwell was based on three men: close friend and mercenary Charles Sweeny, American officer "Buck" Lanham, and most importantly, himself.
[17] Critics claimed the novel was too emotional, had inferior prose and a "static plot", and that Cantwell was an "avatar" for Hemingway's character Nick Adams.
"[28] Critic Ben Stoltzfus agrees, and he believes Hemingway's structure is more comprehensible for the modern reader—exposed to the Nouveau roman—than for those of the mid-20th century.
[34] Filming started in Venice, Italy on December 9, 2020, with Liev Schreiber in the lead role and Paula Ortiz directing.