A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
published
2004
(first published 1964)
by Yupiter-Impeks
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binding
Paperback, 148 pages
isbn
5954200416
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Read in August, 2008
My sister spent some time in Paris recently, and told me I had to read a book. The book in question was ‘A Moveable Feast’ by Hemingway, which to be honest I never heard of.
The competition between Hemingway and Fitzgerald has been immortalized for a long time. I always sided with Fitzgerald as the better writer. I’ve read ‘The Great Gatsby’ three times, and ‘Tender is the Night’ three times, and will return to those books every four to five years. Fitzgerald writes beautifully, ...more
My sister spent some time in Paris recently, and told me I had to read a book. The book in question was ‘A Moveable Feast’ by Hemingway, which to be honest I never heard of.
The competition between Hemingway and Fitzgerald has been immortalized for a long time. I always sided with Fitzgerald as the better writer. I’ve read ‘The Great Gatsby’ three times, and ‘Tender is the Night’ three times, and will return to those books every four to five years. Fitzgerald writes beautifully, in deapth, and has round characters. He is one of my favorite writers. I read ‘The Beautiful and Damned’ and was amazed by it. I think this was after college and maybe in the Kent State days and I said to someone in paraphase ‘Beautifual and Damned is a great book, why is it considered bad and his worst.’ This person replied to me, ‘The worst of the best is probably good.’
For Hemingway’s fiction I don’t have the same passion about. ‘Sun Also Rises’ was good, but ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ I thought it had clipped bad dialogue. Basically I do not like his short writing style, but like more long winded or poetic prose. So with that in mind, giving up Hemingway years ago, it makes siense that I never new of ‘A Moveable Feast’ or cared.
Now that I had a family recommendation, and looked it up that it was a memoir of his Paris years. I read it in about two days, last night drinking coffee at midnight so I could stay awake and pay attention. This is a wonderful book for a couple of reasons. First and foremost for the name dropping. The expatrieate of the era have always fascianted me, a ton of writers found ways to live and write, and Paris was the location. I thought Hemingway had the finances and his Paris was analagous to Fitzgeralds, but it turns out it started more on the Henry Miller experience with the debauchery. What’s fascinating is Hemingway, got by from some small regular journalism gigs, but moved around the literary circles and kind of became a celebrety there before he had his success. In grad school, an a banned book presentation of ‘Tropic of Cancer,’ I researched a lot of this period. I checked out a book called ‘Slyvia Beach and the Lost Generation’ with attentions to read, but it was too academic. But I was aware of this woman’s exsitence who was the center of the English speaking lit community in Paris. Hemingway portrays her as a dominite woman that loaned books to him at first meeting with no monetary reward. She treated him as if he was Joyce. Also, in this Hemingway memoir he drops a lot of names including Stein, Pound, Ford, and others. I don’t think they’ll ever be a circle like that now, with computers people live wherever they want. Hemingway also talks in depth about Fitzgerald, and some of it was harsh on my hero, but it felt like he was telling the truth. That Fitzgerald could not handle his drink and that along with his wife ruined him. Hemingway also displays through a memory put in writing how Fitzgerald had a total lack of impulse control, pay for the best and not shop around.
The other reason this book is good, it shows an emotional side of Hemingway not seen in his macho fiction. Toward the end he’s talking to someone years later, and says there all dead, and then names the ones who died. I can’t imagine liveing through something so impressive and to see it crumble within your own times. The beat poets probrably experienced the same thing.
Lastly, this book is great because Hemingway talks of the process of writing, and gives his opinion on others of his day.
Read it!
...less
Read in March, 2008
I went through an insane Hemingway phase in my early twenties, absolutely loved the guy. Read everything he wrote, and while some were better than others, I was always impressed by his ability to write so powerfully with such few words. To me, his greatest achievements were The Sun Also Rises and his early short stories, mostly collected in the Snows of Kilimanjaro. For whatever reason, A Moveable Feast slipped past, and I never got around to reading it until now.
He wrote this as an older ma...more
I went through an insane Hemingway phase in my early twenties, absolutely loved the guy. Read everything he wrote, and while some were better than others, I was always impressed by his ability to write so powerfully with such few words. To me, his greatest achievements were The Sun Also Rises and his early short stories, mostly collected in the Snows of Kilimanjaro. For whatever reason, A Moveable Feast slipped past, and I never got around to reading it until now.
He wrote this as an older man, and it was published after his death. It really feels like he's lost his edge in this. Sentences don't have the crisp, whiplash quality they used to. Stories sometimes meander, and where they used to end with a sentence that left you thinking for a day about all the different levels of meaning that could be taken from it, these stories often leave me confused or empty when they end. Another weakness is the nostalgia - it often sounds like gramps remembering the good old days, where the wine was always 'delicious,' the sun always 'brilliant,' the women always 'gorgeous,' etc.
But the real value I found in this book was the description of his writing style. The discipline it required, not only with one's time but with one's ability to withstand poverty. Here was a guy with a wife and a kid, and he was living in a crap-ass flat in the poor section of town, no running water or private bathroom even, and he kept doing it because he wanted to write. How many people even do this anymore? It's brave and stupid, and I can't say I'd ever be able to make the same decision, but it led to some of the best fiction we have. As for the methods he used, there's some really interesting stuff in here, like the fact that he always stopped writing when he knew what was going to happen next, so he could be sure he could continue the next day.
The stuff on F. Scott Fitzgerald is also fascinating. You always hear about what a sad, tragic figure he was, but until you read Hemingway bringing it to life, it doesn't hit you how truly sad he was.
Overall, a kind of vague and boozy nostalgic trip down memory lane that reveals a lot about who he was as a writer; occasionally makes you fantastically jealous that you don't live in Paris in the '20s and drink great wine and eat great food and hang out with the most interesting people in the world all day; but mostly leaves you a little empty and wanting something more. At times it feels like one big self-promotion by Hemingway, what a man he was, what a disciplined writer, how much better he was than everyone else in the scene. Which makes for fun stories, but doesn't reveal much about existence....less
bookshelves:
lit
Read in May, 2007
I love this, but I sort of never want to write another word on it again. Here's an excerpt from a final paper I wrote on AMF for a senior honors tutorial:
The importance of Hemingway's 1960 preface to _A Moveable Feast_ in understanding the memoir's ties to postmodernism can hardly be exaggerated. It is here that we may build a firm foundation for reading the memoir as a self-consciously postmodern autobiography rather than the grotesquely self-aggrandizing playbill many critics have...more
I love this, but I sort of never want to write another word on it again. Here's an excerpt from a final paper I wrote on AMF for a senior honors tutorial:
The importance of Hemingway's 1960 preface to _A Moveable Feast_ in understanding the memoir's ties to postmodernism can hardly be exaggerated. It is here that we may build a firm foundation for reading the memoir as a self-consciously postmodern autobiography rather than the grotesquely self-aggrandizing playbill many critics have described. “For reasons sufficient to the writer,” Hemingway announces from the outset, many things have been omitted from A Moveable Feast: This instantly acknowledges the work's shortcomings, underlining the negative spaces, the never-weres. He goes on to provide a laundry list of things that were never included: “There is no mention of the Stade Anasstasie where the boxers served as waiters. . . nor of training with Larry Gains, nor the great twenty-round fights at the Cirque d'Hiver. Nor of such good friends as Charlie Sweeny. . .” The list continues. By recounting what has been left out, Hemingway at once incites the reader to imagine a memoir that never was; a book that hasn't been written. At the same time, however, Hemingway negates his assertion that there is “no mention” of these things in the book by mentioning them in a preface which he knows will be physically included along with the book When he tells us that “[it:] would be fine if all these were in the book but we will have to do without them for now” it is with a tone of such flippancy that one finds it difficult to commiserate with those who would have us believe that Hemingway composed A Moveable Feast with malicious or self-serving intent. The crowning postmodern moment of Hemingway's preface may be its insistence that “if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.” Not only does this announcement free the author from being truthful in his recounting of the past, but it also willfully blurs genre lines and, most importantly, purposefully imparts doubt in the reader as to how much trust to place in the ensuing pages. Gary Brenner reveals in “Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?” that Hemingway, in one draft, had phrased this more forcefully: "This book is fiction."</font></i>...less
Read in August, 2008
recommended to Elise by:
Adam
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." Ernest Hemingway wrote these memorable words to a friend in the 1950s, and it is that quote about Paris being a moveable feast, presumably to be consumed wherever one ends up, that so aptly captures the spirit of this book. Rather than being a story, each chapter is a type of vignette about Hemingway's time spent in that vene...more
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." Ernest Hemingway wrote these memorable words to a friend in the 1950s, and it is that quote about Paris being a moveable feast, presumably to be consumed wherever one ends up, that so aptly captures the spirit of this book. Rather than being a story, each chapter is a type of vignette about Hemingway's time spent in that venerable city during the 1920s with his wife and child. He befriends James Joyce, and Sylvia Beach, the proprietress of what would become the beloved Shakespeare and Co. bookshop. He gambles at the races, argues with Ford Madox Ford, drinks wine, acts as savior and confidante to F. Scott Fitzgerald... the list goes on and on. In retrospect, it is a life to be envied, romanticized here, with Hemingway enjoying friendships with many of that day's great luminaries.
I am not what would be considered a Hemingway fan. I've read a few of books, and while I do enjoy reading stories about his life, such as Lillian Ross' Portrait of Hemingway (a short biography of Ernest which I highly recommend, especially to fans of the gentleman), I've never been able to get caught up in his stories themselves. I read A Farewell to Arms, which is wonderfully conceived and told, and yet end up feeling as if it doesn't elicit the proper emotions that one should feel for the characters. This book, to me, reads largely the same way. I am interested in his daily details, find Ernest's turn of phrase to be sublime, and yet leave feeling as if, well, I have no feelings. I am detached throughout, and as such, find it highly interesting in a biographical sort of way, but leave feeling as distant as ever.
I do recommend the book-- he writes so beautifully and sums things up in a way that is pure genius (such as his "moveable feast" quote). My only regret is that I want him to make me cry-- to make me feel sadness when he writes about falling in love with another woman that is not his wife. Instead, I sit back and observe, and then, turn a page and move on with life....less
Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
anyone
In reading Hemingway's account of the early twenties, a grain of sand is needed to balance out what Hemingway "remembers" and what might have actually happened, but while sitting on the sandy beach sipping apertifs it is perhaps one of the best books I have read all year. Written in small vignettes, and introducing a cast of characters well familiar to the literary and artistic world, I feel pulled and repulsed by the sense of nostalgia for a "bygone" era.
That is perhaps ...more
In reading Hemingway's account of the early twenties, a grain of sand is needed to balance out what Hemingway "remembers" and what might have actually happened, but while sitting on the sandy beach sipping apertifs it is perhaps one of the best books I have read all year. Written in small vignettes, and introducing a cast of characters well familiar to the literary and artistic world, I feel pulled and repulsed by the sense of nostalgia for a "bygone" era.
That is perhaps my greatest criticism of the novel, the sense of nostalgia which must have dripped from Hemingway's thoughts over the page as he was writing. I think even he must have felt the same way, remembering what it was like to be poor and happy in Paris with his first wife, becoming...what he would become. I wonder if his isolation and lonliness were not driving him as he wrote, slowly overcoming his sense of preservation.
The biography on the back of the novel says it well enough:
"Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, Ernest Hemingway was educated there in the public schools. He became a reporter on the Kansas City Star and in World War I served as an ambulance driver in Italy, where he was badly wounded in action. After the war he settled in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, and it was there that he began his serious writing career. He served as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in Idaho in 1961."
Short and sweet. No mention of shotguns or depression. He couldn't have put it better except by writing "A Moveable Feast".
"If you are lucky enough to have lived
in Paris as a young man, then wherever you
go for the rest of your life, it stays with
you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
-Ernest Hemingway
to a friend, 1950...less
bookshelves:
travel
Read in January, 2006
Knowing my habit of writing, a friend told me to read this book. He told me to try and describe a meal in detail like in this book and find how challenging it is. I was intrigued and went a bought a copy.
I was supposed to read this before my trip to Paris. But, for me, reading is a whimsical affair and my choice is often random. I didn't feel like reading this then so I keep it until now. I am reading Bill Clinton's My Life when, yesterday, I felt like something light (literally) for a break...more
Knowing my habit of writing, a friend told me to read this book. He told me to try and describe a meal in detail like in this book and find how challenging it is. I was intrigued and went a bought a copy.
I was supposed to read this before my trip to Paris. But, for me, reading is a whimsical affair and my choice is often random. I didn't feel like reading this then so I keep it until now. I am reading Bill Clinton's My Life when, yesterday, I felt like something light (literally) for a break. So I searched my bookshelf and found this thin volume. Little did I know that I spent my whole Saturday evening reading until 3 AM. This book is captivating in its simplicity.
Ideally, I should read this book before and after Paris but, nevertheless, it is still fun to read it after. I can still imagine the scenes described in my head. One thing for sure, I was lucky to have entered Shakespeare & Co which by now doesn't belong to the original owner, Sylvia Beach, anymore.
Having no knowledgeable of Ernest Hemingway's works, apology to Hemingway's fans, this book reads like gossip column of who's who of American literature figures in Paris in the 20s. I guess for the fans, this book is interesting to see the early Hemingway and how he lived his life as a poor start-up.
My second sin is that I am a literal person when it comes to reading (ie. I do not dwell on the content, Literature 101 style) so I can't really say anything about the substance except that it's fun and educational to read. I like the eloquent style, the precise language, and the detailed description. There are a lot in terms of writing that I can learn from this book.
Am I tempted to read his other works? Maybe. I haven't decided yet. But this is sure a good book to start. ...less
bookshelves:
fiction
Read in August, 2006
recommends it for:
foreign travelers, fans of Lost Gen writers, writers
Who knew that Hemingway was a fanboy? After I read this novel, I found that out. This novel basically recounts Hemingway's days, mostly in Paris, among the famous of the Lost Generation, and his conversations and adventures with them across Europe.
I'll start with my problems with this book: The first 100 pages were incredibly difficult for me to get through, as I do not like Hemingway's writing style. I never have, and I very much doubt that I ever will (with the exception of Sun Also Rises...more
Who knew that Hemingway was a fanboy? After I read this novel, I found that out. This novel basically recounts Hemingway's days, mostly in Paris, among the famous of the Lost Generation, and his conversations and adventures with them across Europe.
I'll start with my problems with this book: The first 100 pages were incredibly difficult for me to get through, as I do not like Hemingway's writing style. I never have, and I very much doubt that I ever will (with the exception of Sun Also Rises, and that mostly an exception of subject matter and character). I am sorry to those of you who have just fallen over in shock that I dared to disparage your holy idol. Think but this, and all is mended, that you have but slumbered here, while this honesty did appear.
Anyway. I thought that he made events that could have been depicted brilliantly in the hands of say, Fitzgerald, for instance... incredibly boring. I had to read things several times before I realized that they actually were interesting.
It is given three stars for a two reasons: 1) The depictions of Paris that are given at times, in the course of detailing his life. There are some particularly charming vignettes that I think are very worth the reading. 2) The pages of Fitzgerald, towards the end. It is as if some of Fitz's magic got itself into Hemingway's pen in depicting him, whether he wanted it to or not. I absolutely adored that tragic, sad section, no matter how much Hemingway wanted me to hate the man.
It is worth the read if you A) like Hemingway B) Are going to Paris, or C) If you love Lost Gen writers- esp. Fitzgerald....less
bookshelves:
book-club
Read in July, 2008
I really haven't read much Hemingway-- a few of the Nick Adams stories in high school, but I somehow missed A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises. I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was 12 or 13, didn't like it, and decided at that point that I didn't like Hemingway. So I was interested to read this book for my book group to see if my opinion had changed at all in the last 19 years. I found this book fascinating because it's a memoir that works on a lot of levels: Hemingway remembering...more
I really haven't read much Hemingway-- a few of the Nick Adams stories in high school, but I somehow missed A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises. I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was 12 or 13, didn't like it, and decided at that point that I didn't like Hemingway. So I was interested to read this book for my book group to see if my opinion had changed at all in the last 19 years. I found this book fascinating because it's a memoir that works on a lot of levels: Hemingway remembering himself as a poor, adventurous and aspiring writer; Hemingway remembering his friends, mostly expatriate writers, that he knew during this time; and Hemingway remembering Paris in the 1920's. Paris is as vivid a character in this work as Gertrude Stein or Fitzgerald. I loved getting to know the personalities of these writers a little better by reading Hemingway reminisce and recall conversations he had with them-- especially the section on F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was in Paris with Hemingway shortly after The Great Gatsby was published. The book definitely grew on me as I moved through it, and by the end I felt like I knew Paris, what it was like to be 'poor' and a writer in the 1920's, and Hemingway's contemporaries better than I had before. But I'm not sure if I know Ernest Hemingway himself any better after reading this book. Despite the fact that he's the narrator and in every scene, I feel like he used his declarative, unadorned writing style to hold the reader at arm's length. If that was the intent...well done....less
Parts of this book are beautiful. I will not forget Hemingway's descriptions of hunger, its physical state, and the way it effected his relationship to the city of Paris and to other artists, and how it effected his work, meaning writing. The strongest parts of the book - the reasons to read it - are Hemingway's reflections on his work, especially his vision for the kind of prose he was developing. He writes these passages in the lean, exacting style he describes himself working towards as a you...more
Parts of this book are beautiful. I will not forget Hemingway's descriptions of hunger, its physical state, and the way it effected his relationship to the city of Paris and to other artists, and how it effected his work, meaning writing. The strongest parts of the book - the reasons to read it - are Hemingway's reflections on his work, especially his vision for the kind of prose he was developing. He writes these passages in the lean, exacting style he describes himself working towards as a young man, the style that ultimately won him a Nobel prize, and at these points, the book is exciting and wonderful to read. He's so young; he doesn't know the rewards ahead; he trusts his instincts; and he works so hard.
It's shocking, then, how often the book disintegrates into a nasty sludge of revelations about people now famous. I don't like Hemingway much after reading this. I can't like someone who could divulge such degenerate details about the lives of people he once called friends. Ironically, these parts are so badly written that they don't even feel true; they just feel self-serving, like the story about the bartender at the Paris Ritz Hotel bar who confided to Hemingway decades after F. Scott Fitzgerald had stopped coming to the bar that he didn't remember the now-famous author. The only one who cares is Hemingway himself.
A brillant writer, Hemingway was, apparently, a pathetic human being. Hemingway lays out this fascinating paradox himself in his own book. ...less
bookshelves:
biography
Read in May, 2008
Is it literature just because Hemingway wrote it? True, his name has become synonymous with The Modern Canon, but this gossipy tell-all might give you some inroads to the real person behind the monolith of drinking and literature. And if you're too high-brow to get your rocks off on reading about the bad behavior of whatever vacuous it-girl dons the cover of Life and Style this week, maybe the juicy gaffes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce will take you there. ...more
Is it literature just because Hemingway wrote it? True, his name has become synonymous with The Modern Canon, but this gossipy tell-all might give you some inroads to the real person behind the monolith of drinking and literature. And if you're too high-brow to get your rocks off on reading about the bad behavior of whatever vacuous it-girl dons the cover of Life and Style this week, maybe the juicy gaffes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce will take you there.
I read this trashy little number in about 2 sittings, virtually drinking in the oft-parodied but still so good stoic prose as Hemingway waxed manly and understated on Fitzgerald's drinking and hypochondria, Gertrude Stein's greatness, Ezra Pound's generosity.
Never does he pass judgement or fly too freely with the adjectives. Yet you will get down on your two knees the night after you have finished reading it and beg God or Whomever to please transport you back to Paris in the Twenties when a struggling writer could drink multiple bottles of white wine in the afternoon and dine in cafes and travel to Spain in summer and Austria in winter and bet on horses and still support an adoring wife and child and write about it all in stunning, genre-revolutionizing novels....less
Read in November, 2007
Perhaps what interests me most about this book
was how I discovered it and felt compelled to
read it.
I was reading the lyrics to the Rufus
Wainwright's song "Poses" on songmeanings.net
and someone mentioned that Rufus' writing
in the song reminded them of this book.
The writer describes the message of the
song and quotes Hemingway: "I felt the death
loneliness that comes at the end of every day
that is wasted in your life."
Though I still fail to see t...more
Perhaps what interests me most about this book
was how I discovered it and felt compelled to
read it.
I was reading the lyrics to the Rufus
Wainwright's song "Poses" on songmeanings.net
and someone mentioned that Rufus' writing
in the song reminded them of this book.
The writer describes the message of the
song and quotes Hemingway: "I felt the death
loneliness that comes at the end of every day
that is wasted in your life."
Though I still fail to see the book's
connection to this song, it was that quote
that led to my lust for this book.
This book is a lovely memoir of Hemingway's
life in Paris in the 1920s at the beginning
of his career. It is the details that draw
you in: a description of a meal, the men
and women on the streets, the numerous
cafes and drinks. These observational
passages are quite charming.
I love the portraits he paints of
Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald,
among other literary figures.
He lives modestly, continually commenting
on his lack of money, yet seems to always
live in the moment.
By the end, you can feel his life is
changing and want to explore more
of his work.
This is the perfect read for someone in
their early twenties. You'll relate to the
enthusiasm Hemingway has for starting his
career as a writer and the for the city he
desires to experience every inch of.
I highly recommend this. ...less
bookshelves:
2007
Read in August, 2007
recommends it for:
Hemingway Haters, Hemingway Lovers, Modernists
I read this book to give Hemingway another chance. I had never been a fan of his and have to pretty much force myself through his books even if I can appreciate his talent as a writer. Then I picked up this. It was my "airport book" on my way to NYC. I always get one airport book - the one book I am allowed to purchase at the airport as opposed to pack and bring with me. I made this a rule of thumb after I went to Jamaica and ran out of reading material in 3 days. So now I always pack ...more
I read this book to give Hemingway another chance. I had never been a fan of his and have to pretty much force myself through his books even if I can appreciate his talent as a writer. Then I picked up this. It was my "airport book" on my way to NYC. I always get one airport book - the one book I am allowed to purchase at the airport as opposed to pack and bring with me. I made this a rule of thumb after I went to Jamaica and ran out of reading material in 3 days. So now I always pack more than I could possibly read even if I am only going for a short train ride.
Anyway, back to the book. This book made me fall in love with Hemingway. It's his memoirs of living in Paris with his wife at age 25 with all the other Ex-Patriots floating around the city. He recounts his personal tales of all the other famous people he was chummy with. It kind of reminds you that yes, it really was a community of poor artists living together. Sometimes that needs reminding as we're taught to revere these names with awe from a very young age (especially us Chicagoans - Hemingway was born and grew up in Oak Park, just outside of the city).
His language is beautiful. The personal stream of consciousness gave me insight into his writing and his thought process. If people are going to teach Hemingway, they should teach this book alongside anything else. It is the essence of why he writes. ...less
bookshelves:
essential-reference
Read in August, 1989
Whenever a friend/Roman/lover/countryman/debtor/student/
jackass bar brawler tells me that Hemingway lost it after THE SUN ALSO RISES or (being generous) A FAREWELL TO ARMS, I say: read this book. There are moments of vile approbation. It saddens me infinitely to hear EH bang on Gertrude and Scott, and some of the dialogue is transparently punchdrunk. But when I want to read a book by someone who lost his shit and knew he lost it spectularly, this be the one. There are few passages more self-re...more
Whenever a friend/Roman/lover/countryman/debtor/student/
jackass bar brawler tells me that Hemingway lost it after THE SUN ALSO RISES or (being generous) A FAREWELL TO ARMS, I say: read this book. There are moments of vile approbation. It saddens me infinitely to hear EH bang on Gertrude and Scott, and some of the dialogue is transparently punchdrunk. But when I want to read a book by someone who lost his shit and knew he lost it spectularly, this be the one. There are few passages more self-recriminating in lit than the moment at the end of this one in which EH, lameting his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, says that he would rather have died than love anyone else than his first wife, Hadley. This is Hemingway kicking his own ass, and thus, a lesson to us all....less
This book confirms my idea that Hemingway is the tactful, more polite Bukowski. Both are terse and write cleanly, a sort of precise tasselation though emotion sometimes oozes through the tight cracks, and they are the more distilled.
A Moveable Feast is a testimony to the idea that one must surround oneself with passionate people if one wants to be actively involved with creating.
If you are already familiar with Hemingway's stories, and admire him as an Author (capital A), this text bri...more
This book confirms my idea that Hemingway is the tactful, more polite Bukowski. Both are terse and write cleanly, a sort of precise tasselation though emotion sometimes oozes through the tight cracks, and they are the more distilled.
A Moveable Feast is a testimony to the idea that one must surround oneself with passionate people if one wants to be actively involved with creating.
If you are already familiar with Hemingway's stories, and admire him as an Author (capital A), this text brings him and his contemporaries back down to earth. At one point he and his friends were not the great novelists who now infiltrate our collective subconscious. At some point they too were just starting out, frequently doubtful about their capabilities and still searching for that "one true sentence" and how to write it.
Just like any regular job, one must work at being a good writer. One must develop a strict regimen and concentrate on really turning out the good words. That said, the chapter called "Birth of a New School" is a pretty scathing condemnation of the critic.
The most challenging quotation from the book: "You shouldn't write if you can't write. What do you have to cry about it for? Go home. Get a job. Hang yourself. Only don't talk about it. You could never write."
...less
Read in August, 2007
I tore through this Lost Generation tattler. Almost everyone who has come to embody the zeitgeist of 1920s Paris is in this book--Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and, duh, Hemingway himself. For gossip alone, this book delights.
Like his other books I’ve read, A Moveable Feast's style is removed and observational. Perhaps appropriate to the time elapsed since the book happened…but still weird for writing about yourself and your friends. I’m left ...more
I tore through this Lost Generation tattler. Almost everyone who has come to embody the zeitgeist of 1920s Paris is in this book--Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and, duh, Hemingway himself. For gossip alone, this book delights.
Like his other books I’ve read, A Moveable Feast's style is removed and observational. Perhaps appropriate to the time elapsed since the book happened…but still weird for writing about yourself and your friends. I’m left wondering whether his relationships felt as asymmetric then as they do in his retelling.
Hem tells Scott Fitzgerald to "write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can." But he might have done better by history and taken some of his own advice: his prose is beautifully uncomplicated, but with every page, I was less convinced that he was writing straight...or even trying.
I would have loved a companion history/chronology to read with this to develop a deeper (and more accurate?) picture of this historical moment. A quick Amazon search turned up several options…but none of the local stores had it in stock at the precise moment I wanted it. And with books, delaying gratification turns reading into a chore. At least for me.
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bookshelves:
non-fiction
Read in April, 2006
recommends it for:
expats and struggling artists
Since I read this I've heard a criticism - that his writing style in Feast is like a caricature of itself. However, other than some Nick Adams stories, I've never read anything else by him, so it doesn't matter to me. Feast has many bright lights, full of werewolves in their youth doing the inadvisable and saying the preposterous.
I love Hemingway's descriptions of what it's like to be hungry in Paris - to have to escape to the park during lunch time because you can't afford a m...more
Since I read this I've heard a criticism - that his writing style in Feast is like a caricature of itself. However, other than some Nick Adams stories, I've never read anything else by him, so it doesn't matter to me. Feast has many bright lights, full of werewolves in their youth doing the inadvisable and saying the preposterous.
I love Hemingway's descriptions of what it's like to be hungry in Paris - to have to escape to the park during lunch time because you can't afford a meal, because everywhere else you walk smells too good, and how the hunger brings a sharp clarity of the senses. I love the haughty Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway's sweet wife and infant son. The author always seems to be drinking chilled white wine. This is the ultimate romance - to be a writer in Paris, bound for greatness.
Later in this memoir Hemingway starts punching you in the stomach. He foreshadows the end of his first marriage, his youth and his innocence. You'll be lying on the couch reading and come to the end of a chapter: "It was then that I knew that Zelda Fitzgerald was insane." Rest the open book face down on your chest and look at the ceiling, and breath out. "My God, Hemingway, I know it."...less
bookshelves:
bookgroup,
classics
Read in September, 2006
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is his only nonfiction work and his first to be published posthumously. A Moveable Feast covers Hemingway's first extended time in Paris in the 20's, as he lives in a cheap apartment with his wife and son, spending his days writing in cafes and socializing with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. It even includes a wild trip to Lyons with Scott Fitzgerald.
Written in the romanticized style of this time period you'll want to hop the next f...more
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is his only nonfiction work and his first to be published posthumously. A Moveable Feast covers Hemingway's first extended time in Paris in the 20's, as he lives in a cheap apartment with his wife and son, spending his days writing in cafes and socializing with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. It even includes a wild trip to Lyons with Scott Fitzgerald.
Written in the romanticized style of this time period you'll want to hop the next flight to Paris so that you too can live in the moment. Hemingway captures the feeling of Paris in the 1920's perfectly. The carefree life of an artist or writer is enviable. The ease in which they fit into a foreign world, make friends with one another, feed and learn off of one another is truly unique. This book moves at a slow pace, mimicking the lifestyle they lived, and is also very broken, living in the moment much like these artists did. It is particularly interesting to see Hemingway, a literary giant of today, humbled as he struggles to write, never believing he'll be able to write a full novel like Scott Fitzgerald. This is a book you will escape in....less
Read in August, 2007
I've no idea why it took me so long to finish this. Maybe because I started it so soon after The Sun Also Rises. Maybe Hemingway to more Hemingway was a bad idea.
Just finished this morning, and as it happens with me and him, I felt his momentum really pick up at the end and couldn't put the thing down during the last quarter of the novel.
Anyone who has read Stein, Pound, or Fitzgerald should read this book. He had friendships with all of them in Paris and writes stark, sometimes unsavory...more
I've no idea why it took me so long to finish this. Maybe because I started it so soon after The Sun Also Rises. Maybe Hemingway to more Hemingway was a bad idea.
Just finished this morning, and as it happens with me and him, I felt his momentum really pick up at the end and couldn't put the thing down during the last quarter of the novel.
Anyone who has read Stein, Pound, or Fitzgerald should read this book. He had friendships with all of them in Paris and writes stark, sometimes unsavory, portraits. But I believe his judgments because Hemingway doesn't sugar coat a thing.
Favorite bit:
“We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love."
"And we’ll never love anyone else but each other."
"No. Never."
{...}
"My," she said. "We’re lucky that you found the place."
"We’re always lucky," I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.
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I've never read this before, despite having bought it a few months back at a library sale. So I picked it up the other night and read it through in an hour.
I loved this--it was classic Hemingway, and particularly enjoyable to read because I know quite a bit about his life, so it was interesting to read the semi-fictionalized version. I also particularly enjoyed the chapters about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway's commentary on the relationship between Scott and Zelda. And as always, I r...more
I've never read this before, despite having bought it a few months back at a library sale. So I picked it up the other night and read it through in an hour.
I loved this--it was classic Hemingway, and particularly enjoyable to read because I know quite a bit about his life, so it was interesting to read the semi-fictionalized version. I also particularly enjoyed the chapters about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway's commentary on the relationship between Scott and Zelda. And as always, I reveled in the classic Hemingway sentences and the sheer beauty of his prose.
Two of my favorite sentences in the book were the lines under the chapter heading for Fitzgerald: "His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly away any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."
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bookshelves:
non-fiction,
own,
ramble-on,
real-people
Read in June, 2006
recommends it for:
writers, people who like Hemingway, people who like ambling around foreign countries.
Classic Hemingway, of course. I wouldn't recommend this as a first for someone who hasn't read him, if only because it's mostly just him hanging out with his first wife and his friends - there's no over-arching plot, just an inter-connectedness of location and time period. There are some truly heart-warming moments between him and his wife and son, as well as some laugh-out-loud bits about his time with the Fitzgeralds. His powers of description, as always, are acute, and he captures Paris in th...more
Classic Hemingway, of course. I wouldn't recommend this as a first for someone who hasn't read him, if only because it's mostly just him hanging out with his first wife and his friends - there's no over-arching plot, just an inter-connectedness of location and time period. There are some truly heart-warming moments between him and his wife and son, as well as some laugh-out-loud bits about his time with the Fitzgeralds. His powers of description, as always, are acute, and he captures Paris in the way of a true native.
As per usual with Hem, I find that a familiarity or affinity for the subject matter helps when reading him. Sun Also Rises is one of my favorites, but I don't know if I would have ever found that out were it not for my vivid visualizations from my trips to Spain to keep me going through some spots. The same goes for this. People who have been to Paris - or want to go - and people who are really into Fitzgerald will probably find this easier to read than someone who just picks it up randomly. (Intense Hemingway fans aside, obviously.)...less
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