A Moveable Feast

published	2000 by Vintage
binding	Paperback
isbn	0099285045 (isbn13: 9780099285045)
pages	191
description	In the preface to A Moveable Feast, Hemingway remarks casually that "if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction"--an...more [close] In the preface to A Moveable Feast, Hemingway remarks casually that "if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction"--and, indeed, fact or fiction, it doesn't matter, for his slim memoir of Paris in the 1920s is as enchanting as anything made up and has become the stuff of legend. Paris in the '20s! Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, lived happily on $5 a day and still had money for drinks at the Closerie des Lilas, skiing in the Alps, and fishing trips to Spain. On every corner and at every café table, there were the most extraordinary people living wonderful lives and telling fantastic stories. Gertrude Stein invited Hemingway to come every afternoon and sip "fragrant, colorless alcohols" and chat admid her great pictures. He taught Ezra Pound how to box, gossiped with James Joyce, caroused with the fatally insecure Scott Fitzgerald (the acid portraits of him and his wife, Zelda, are notorious). Meanwhile, Hemingway invented a new way of writing based on this simple premise: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." Hemingway beautifully captures the fragile magic of a special time and place, and he manages to be nostalgic without hitting any false notes of sentimentality. "This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," he concludes. Originally published in 1964, three years after his suicide, A Moveable Feast was the first of his posthumous books and remains the best. --David Laskin [close]
date added	12-06-06 edit book

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | Abebooks | more...

discuss this book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

groups with this book

friend reviews (0)

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

This book is not in any lists. Go add it to a list.

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 5758)

Larissa rated it:

(review of isbn 068482499X)

01/03/08

bookshelves: short-stories, vicarious-travel

Read in January, 2008

Reading A Moveable Feast was a strange combination of pure pleasure and pure torture for me. On one hand, what could be better than reading a pseudo-memoir written by the unabashedly self-absorbed, and yet enduringly charming, Hemingway--all white wine, manliness, and burgeoning craft, with an excess of anecdotes and remembrances (often unflattering and unfair, god bless him) of his eccentric and luminous contemporaries? Not much. Especially with such memories: of Gertrude "Aldous Hu...more Reading A Moveable Feast was a strange combination of pure pleasure and pure torture for me. On one hand, what could be better than reading a pseudo-memoir written by the unabashedly self-absorbed, and yet enduringly charming, Hemingway--all white wine, manliness, and burgeoning craft, with an excess of anecdotes and remembrances (often unflattering and unfair, god bless him) of his eccentric and luminous contemporaries? Not much. Especially with such memories: of Gertrude "Aldous Huxley writes like a dead man" Stein, of Wyndham "Eyes of an Unsuccessful Rapist" Lewis, of confirming for Scott Fitzgerald that his endowment was of a sufficient dimension to please any decent woman (compared, when it was, with statues at the Louve).

Everything is romantic: unheated Parisian cafes, living on money borrowed from the woman who owns the bookstore/library, having dinner with fire eaters, skiing up into the tip-top of the Alps to learn about avalanches in the winter, losing 6 months' savings on the ponies, boxing with Ezra Pound, donating money to fund T.S. Elliot's departure from his humdrum bank job. Eating and drinking. Not eating and drinking.

But especially, 'Working.' That up-with-the-sun-to-work-on-my-craft self-imposed grindstone that one sweats over as one might laying bricks and mortar all day. For from the way Hemingway describes it, writing--working--is hard, physical (manly) labor. It taxes you and it costs you and it takes a whole morning to get a paragraph written, but all the better! Like a good climb up a tall mountain, your exhaustion only proves that you've done something real and worthwhile. Which is a sentiment that can make any writer-in-training feel grand and important. This isn't art or creativity or any pansy self-expression. This. Is. Work.

And yet...

Hemingway tells us of a time when one could travel through Europe on a seasonal basis, drink bottles of wine by the liter, eat out in cafes all the time, and still be considered poor. When you could make a living selling magazine stories and the odd piece of journalism. When these combined payments were not only enough to fund an apartment for you and your wife and son, but also for a nursemaid, and for a separate hotel room in which you could work (naked, if need be).

It's a particularly classy brand of poverty that doesn't sound impoverished at all.

Alas and alack. But it's still fun to read about....less

Like this review? yes (4 people liked it)

4 comments

Casey rated it:

03/02/08

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

Like this review? yes

1 comments

Kelly rated it:

(review of isbn 068482499X)

05/29/07

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

Like this review? yes

title link
avg rating
small image
med image
large image

A Moveable Feast

discuss this book

groups with this book

friend reviews (0)

lists with this book

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 5758)

book data (includes all editions)

blog this book

popular shelves

other editions

quote