Autumn in Venice
A popular subgenre of biography is the chronicle of a friendship between a “leading historical figure and a minor, sometimes unknown character”, said John Walsh in The Sunday Times. Autumn in Venice is one such example: it charts the “doomed, late-flowering romance” between Ernest Hemingway and a young Venetian named Adriana Ivancich. In 1948, Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, visited Venice for the first time. Hemingway, aged 49, was an “international celebrity”, constantly mobbed by admirers and pursued by journalists. The pair took up residence in the Gritti Palace hotel and dined most days at Harry’s Bar. “Into this heady convivium” stepped 18-year-old Adriana, the scion of a shipbuilding family. To say that Hemingway fell in love “doesn’t begin to describe his state of besottedness”, said Michael Mewshaw in The Washington Post. “He lost his heart, his head and his vaunted artistic detachment to a teenage girl.” Although there is no evidence that the two were ever sexually intimate, they “paired off in public” – scandalising Venetian society – and Adriana remained Hemingway’s “muse” for the next eight years.
The “affair” had a significant impact on Hemingway’s life and work, said Andrew Lycett in the Literary Review. The “fantasy” Adriana represented gave him a “new lease of creative life”, enabling him to complete several novels – including The Old Man and the Sea – at a time when his literary powers were waning and his behaviour was increasingly bizarre. Andrea di Robilant, an Italian journalist, “combines a light touch with a command of detail” to bring this period alive. Written in an “easy-paced style”, this is a revealing, sympathetic portrait of an “enduringly fascinating” writer and his unlikely last muse.