This is an absolutely lovely book. Every page has at least one gem of a sentence or paragraph that makes me want to stop reading and just savor those words for an hour or a day. The time it pictures, Paris and the Alps between the wars, and the way it pictures it, raise in me a deep anemoia, nostalgia for a time I never experienced.
And it's surprisingly funny, biting, satirical, with a dry humor that I at least don't normally associate with Hemingway.
Some love Hemingway (1899 – 1961) and some hate him, but no one can say he didn't have a huge influence on American writing of the 20th century—and beyond. I can't think of an author who's easier to imitate and parody and who so often is. That should be an insult and is when it applies to someone like Donald Trump, but here it attests to how strong and distinctive his style was. A Moveable Feast is a posthumously published memoir about Hemingway's years in Paris after World War I, and includes passages about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. (The book is a must for Fitzgerald readers.) It made me sad to know that I did not live in those years, in Paris, which Hemingway describes as "the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is." This is the first …
Some love Hemingway (1899 – 1961) and some hate him, but no one can say he didn't have a huge influence on American writing of the 20th century—and beyond. I can't think of an author who's easier to imitate and parody and who so often is. That should be an insult and is when it applies to someone like Donald Trump, but here it attests to how strong and distinctive his style was. A Moveable Feast is a posthumously published memoir about Hemingway's years in Paris after World War I, and includes passages about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. (The book is a must for Fitzgerald readers.) It made me sad to know that I did not live in those years, in Paris, which Hemingway describes as "the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is." This is the first real memoir material of Hemingway's I've read, and at times I found it strange to read sentences in his style about things less dramatic than big game hunting, bull fighting, and war. As good as it is, a sentence like, "I had never been able to read a novel by Ouida, not even at some skiing place in Switzerland where reading material had run out when the wet south wind had come and there were only the left-behind Tauchnitz editions of before the war," almost sounds like a parody. But those sentences are rare, and reading this makes you appreciate how important, and even dangerous in its way, writing was to Hemingway.
Written with great brevity, Hemingway sets out not to describe but to simply write true accounts of his time spent writing in Paris, an interesting series of reflections from his time with Gertrude Stein to that with Fitzgerald. There was something refreshing about the way Hemingway penned this account, it felt like a series of short letters to the reader, nothing to throttle the senses, just tastes of another world, another life lived, and perhaps giving us scope to a wider picture of humanity, the artist, the movement of the world.
The Hemingway I have read, and because I have never been too sure about reading any Hemingway, I found this worked for me on its own level.
