Larissa's review
A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
This is one of my favorites, too. Reading it makes the act of writing (successfully) look so easy. All you have to do is wake up early and steal out of the apartment (leaving wife, child, and cat to fend for themselves) as you go to a cafe to write one true sentence, then another, and so forth. You're done by noon and free to drink, gossip, read the paper, or walk all over the Left Bank (cash it in!).
Even more disturbing, the writing itself (Hemingway's, I mean) looks easy -- enough to make erstwhile writers say, "I can do that!" Right. How endearingly annoying, right?
Anyway, I think your review captures the "hunger is good discipline" part of Hemingway's craft. Probably he was at his peak as a writer in these "starving artist" days in the 20s.
Let's see -- in what metropolitan European city could one afford to be a starving artist THESE days? Prague? No more. Lisbon maybe...? Given the value of the dollar (quickly sinking under the Bush), maybe an American city would be more apt...
I'm by no means well-traveled so I might be leaving something obvious out, but I'm having a hard time thinking of super-cheap European cities. Second-hand information has told me that Berlin is very affordable (and perhaps a new mecca for artists of a kind), and that certain Canadian cities are pretty amazing and affordable, too.
For American cities, nowhere springs to mind with the right combination of romantic mystique and affordability...there should be some sort of database dedicated to such information.
Detroit?
Detroit? Romantic mystique and affordability? Well, I've never been, so I shouldn't judge. Still, I think of Detroit and I think of a big Gary, Indiana. Still, so many cities are reinventing themselves (e.g. areas of Baltimore, the Old Port section of Portland, ME, etc.) that my Detroit bias may be dated. As for Portland, Maine, it is romantic and has real personality, but cheap it is not. Buying food alone would put you in the poor house.
Larissa, I agree about that database. Only I'm not so well-traveled myself. In fact, I gave up flying over a decade ago. I travel to Europe by ocean liner (like Hemingway) and around the States by train (like... um... help me here). I will say this -- if you go to the Left Bank of Paris, Hemingway's book STILL works as a great Fodor's. You can see his old apartment over what was a lumberyard, Gertrude Stein's place, the Jardin Luxembourg, the Closerie de Lilas, and on and on.
Only thing is, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. has moved. Bookstore can be found, but not where Hemingway would have found it (just FYI)...
Larissa's review
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Larissa's review
rating:
bookshelves:
short-stories,
vicarious-travel
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...more
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...more
This is one of my favorites, too. Reading it makes the act of writing (successfully) look so easy. All you have to do is wake up early and steal out of the apartment (leaving wife, child, and cat to fend for themselves) as you go to a cafe to write one true sentence, then another, and so forth. You're done by noon and free to drink, gossip, read the paper, or walk all over the Left Bank (cash it in!).Even more disturbing, the writing itself (Hemingway's, I mean) looks easy -- enough to make erstwhile writers say, "I can do that!" Right. How endearingly annoying, right?
Anyway, I think your review captures the "hunger is good discipline" part of Hemingway's craft. Probably he was at his peak as a writer in these "starving artist" days in the 20s.
Let's see -- in what metropolitan European city could one afford to be a starving artist THESE days? Prague? No more. Lisbon maybe...? Given the value of the dollar (quickly sinking under the Bush), maybe an American city would be more apt...
I'm by no means well-traveled so I might be leaving something obvious out, but I'm having a hard time thinking of super-cheap European cities. Second-hand information has told me that Berlin is very affordable (and perhaps a new mecca for artists of a kind), and that certain Canadian cities are pretty amazing and affordable, too. For American cities, nowhere springs to mind with the right combination of romantic mystique and affordability...there should be some sort of database dedicated to such information.
Detroit?
Detroit? Romantic mystique and affordability? Well, I've never been, so I shouldn't judge. Still, I think of Detroit and I think of a big Gary, Indiana. Still, so many cities are reinventing themselves (e.g. areas of Baltimore, the Old Port section of Portland, ME, etc.) that my Detroit bias may be dated. As for Portland, Maine, it is romantic and has real personality, but cheap it is not. Buying food alone would put you in the poor house.Larissa, I agree about that database. Only I'm not so well-traveled myself. In fact, I gave up flying over a decade ago. I travel to Europe by ocean liner (like Hemingway) and around the States by train (like... um... help me here). I will say this -- if you go to the Left Bank of Paris, Hemingway's book STILL works as a great Fodor's. You can see his old apartment over what was a lumberyard, Gertrude Stein's place, the Jardin Luxembourg, the Closerie de Lilas, and on and on.
Only thing is, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. has moved. Bookstore can be found, but not where Hemingway would have found it (just FYI)...
