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A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway

4.04 · Rating details · 117,969 ratings · 8,124 reviews

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast captures what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921, three years after the trauma of the Great War and at the beginning of the transformation of Europe's cultural landscap ...more

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Paperback, 211 pages

Published May 29th 1996 by Simon & Schuster (first published 1964)

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Sep 07, 2013 Jeffrey Keeten rated it liked it

”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

The Lost Generation: Hemingway and the circle of ex-pat friends he later immortalised in The Sun Also Rises. More friends, including Harold Loeb, the model for Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, on the left, Hemingway in the centre and Hadley on the right.

I hadn’t planned to read this book until I read this great ar ...more

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Mar 13, 2012 Julie Christine rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: bio-autobio-memoir, france-french-theme-setting, classic, best-of-2012, read-2012

If you haven't been to Paris, you just won't get A Moveable Feast...
If you aren't already a fan of Hemingway, don't bother reading A Moveable Feast

Look, I'm struggling to get a start on this review and those were the first two statements that popped into my head. I don't know if they are true. I don't know if they are fair. What I do know is this work - fiction, memoir, sketches, a polished diary - whichever of these it may be - wouldn't exist without Paris. Obviously, right? No, that's not wh ...more

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Jun 24, 2014 Lisa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nobels

Loved it!

Like Hemingway, I love Paris from the bottom of my heart. And like him, I was lucky enough to spend some time there as a 22-year-old university student. I remember the feeling when I got off the train, knowing I had months of P-A-R-I-S ahead, and how precious each minute felt. I remember walking the streets, stopping to gaze into shop windows, to have coffee, or to browse bookstores. And I remember reading all those wonderful authors who had made Paris their home, feeling connected to t ...more

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Nov 13, 2009 Ellen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, autobiography-memoir

Though often containing gorgeous prose, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has a clear agenda. The book treats Hemingway’s life in Paris from 1921 to 1926. Although the book clearly is autobiographical, in the Preface, Hemingway, after explaining that several items were left out of his memoir, then suggests, rather coyly, that “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction” and adds, “But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written Though often containing gorgeous prose, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has a clear agenda. The book treats Hemingway’s life in Paris from 1921 to 1926. Although the book clearly is autobiographical, in the Preface, Hemingway, after explaining that several items were left out of his memoir, then suggests, rather coyly, that “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction” and adds, “But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” In essence, Hemingway wants it both ways: the book may be regarded as either fact or fiction. Although there is no reason for readers to read the work as fiction, Hemingway’s suggestion serves two ends. First, Hemingway introduces the idea that the book could be viewed as a novel, an idea that echoes the famous challenge he issued when he wrote The Green Hills of Africa where he ponders whether a work of nonfiction, if written truly enough, could compete with a work of the imagination. Aligning the work with fiction promotes its artistry; in addition, Hemingway’s Preface serves to justify his carefully reconstructed version of his early life.

However, Hemingway’s book does not seem like fiction because of what he leaves out, but rather for what he puts in. And, what Hemingway adds is gossip. Rather than the often vain, self-centered, and troubled person that Hemingway was, he presents a smoothed over, patient, loyal, and often loving version of himself. His first wife, Hadley, whom Hemingway unceremoniously dumped for Pauline Pfeiffer, is promoted to near sainthood. Ford Madox Ford is presented as hygienically challenged and a fool, Ezra Pound is a saint, and Ernest Walsh is a posturing liar. Yet, Hemingway presents his gossip artfully, even reluctantly. At one point, in reference to rumors about a writing award in which Ernest Walsh was involved, Hemingway disassociates himself from gossip and even attempts to admonish the reader: “If the news [about the writing award:] was passed around by gossip or rumor, or if it was a matter of personal confidence, cannot be said. Let us hope and believe always that it was completely honorable in every way” (125).

Despite Hemingway’s stated qualms about avoiding gossip and upholding honor, he shows no restraint in his portraits of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Stein is introduced early in the memoir, and then destroyed completely in a later chapter entitled, “A Strange Enough Ending.” Tellingly, Hemingway begins the chapter by observing, “There is not much future in men being friends with great women…and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers” (117). Significantly, Hemingway diminishes Stein’s writing ability by relegating her to a general group of “ambitious women writers.” Hemingway recounts visiting Stein’s house; as he waits for her, he overhears an intimate conversation. Hemingway writes, “…I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever.

Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy” (118). Hemingway takes pains to describe how he quietly exits and asks the maidservant to say she had met him in the courtyard, and that he had never entered the house. Nevertheless, Hemingway’s willingness to write the incident and include a private conversation belies the gentlemanly behavior he tries to portray. The intimate conversation Hemingway provides—word-for-word—is designed to make Stein look foolish and weak. Hemingway uses gossip to assert his superiority.

Despite the many pages devoted to Gertrude Stein, Hemingway’s portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald serves as the book’s dramatic core. By the time Hemingway meets Fitzgerald, he has already published This Side of Paradise and had just completed The Great Gatsby. In contrast, Hemingway has not yet been able to write a novel and worries whether he can. When he reads The Great Gatsby, its genius stuns him. Hemingway’s artful vignette of Fitzgerald serves to cut him down to size. Throughout the book, Hemingway carefully constructs his writing persona and implies that the attributes he displays—discipline, diligence, and attention to craft—are the qualities of a true writer. In contrast, Hemingway introduces his portrait of Fitzgerald by implicitly comparing talent with craft.

Like Fitzgerald’s physique and character, which Hemingway dissects piece-by-piece, Fitzgerald’s writing ability is portrayed as weak and suspect. Fitzgerald, Hemingway implies, has not earned his ability to write; even worse, Fitzgerald only recognizes his talent after it is gone: “Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” Hemingway implies that Fitzgerald’s writing was not an intellectual, crafted ability, but more a matter of luck. Fitzgerald was given a portion of talent, but he had not worked for it, and it contrasts with the sturdy and true writing that emerges from craft.

Not content with rendering Fitzgerald’s writing ability suspect, Hemingway continues to dissect Fitzgerald, taking direct aim at his manhood. Like a good gossip, Hemingway provides salacious details. However, Hemingway packages his gossip carefully. Hemingway writes, artfully: “Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have the mouth of a beauty…The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.”

In the following chapter, “A Matter of Measurements,” Hemingway assuages the insecurity Fitzgerald feels because of a comment Zelda has made by taking Fitzgerald into the men’s room, inspecting him, and pronouncing the size of his penis normal. The content could hardly be more intimate and sensational. Hemingway performs verbal surgery throughout A Moveable Feast, and despite the book’s artistry, Hemingway spares almost no one his scathing memoir.
...more

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Oct 06, 2018 Justin Tate rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

How have I not read this before?? Absolute perfection from beginning to end. Budding artists will eagerly highlight the numerous sentences on craft and style. Literature lovers will moan when Hemingway casually describes hanging out with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and a long list of other giants who happened to all be writing in Paris at the same time. If you're both a writer and a reader, this book is a must for sure. The scenes are deliciously candid. In one ...more

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Mar 27, 2019 Steven Godin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: paris, memoir-autobiography, non-fiction

I don't quite know why it's taken me so long to get around to reading Hemingway, but that's two brilliant works now in a matter of weeks, after too many years of leaving him distant at the back of my mind. And if I'm honest, I never thought of him as a writer I would even like. How wrong was I. Hemingway wrote this when he was a successful older writer, about the experience of being a young man who was not yet successful, but who was happily writing away and dearly in love with his first wife Ha I don't quite know why it's taken me so long to get around to reading Hemingway, but that's two brilliant works now in a matter of weeks, after too many years of leaving him distant at the back of my mind. And if I'm honest, I never thought of him as a writer I would even like. How wrong was I. Hemingway wrote this when he was a successful older writer, about the experience of being a young man who was not yet successful, but who was happily writing away and dearly in love with his first wife Hadley. It's all very personal, but in the most generous and rewarding way, and when reading it I never felt like I was observing a person of self-indulgence.

As a posthumously published memoir (although it kind of reads like a novel) Hemingway describes the time he spent in Paris after the first world war, and the title - 'A Moveable Feast' feels most appropriate, as it's like moving around in circles during a banquet with a host of bohemian luminaries - Joyce, Pound, Madox Ford, and Scott Fitzgerald were all there living it up there (Fitzgerald features strongly in the book's last third). Not only does Hemingway depict himself surrounded by literary mentors and competitors, some he thinks highly of, some he doesn't, he is careful to record his gastronomic experiences. Food, visual art, alcohol (plenty of that) and racing provide the backbone of this unassuming memoir. Oh, and he was clearly a big fan of Ivan Turgenev, reading him often. His writing style here has exactly the same feel as his fiction: casual and affectionate, always engaging and easy to read, it's deceptive simplicity works a treat. There are lessons in his actual language, which is wonderful, and there are lessons also in the insight into his writer's brain, and the understanding of the fragility of the balance between being able to do it, and not being able to do it. He is writing about the joy of getting it right, with all the unspoken knowledge of the sadness of getting it wrong, both in writing and in life.

Hemingway's recollections are at times almost gossipy and he does spring up some surprising sentences, but you never feel too overwhelmed by the high concentration of egos gathered together, sometimes on the same page. We discover that Gertrude Stein was a frequent visitor to the young writer, that he did not get on so well with Ford Madox Ford, and that Ezra Pound always admired the work of his friends. The edition I read was punctuated with photographs, both of the manuscript and of the author and his contemporaries in Paris, including James Joyce and an alcohol infused F Scott Fitzgerald. And by the time we get to Zelda later on, it's quite clear that she also likes the odd drink. Actually when wasn't she drinking. Each chapter is short and vignette-like, comical, sometimes bitchy but always warming.

Although I loved the book as a whole, it's especially the last third when in the company of Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda (who could have been nearing a nervous breakdown) that really pushed me to give this the five star treatment. Considering By 1956 Hemingway was in a terrible state, both mentally and physically he was a wreck, but could still craft writing that is eternal. A Moveable Feast should be seen as the product of a man in terminal decline as much as the triumphant recollection of one beginning to realise his true powers. Except, it doesn't read like that at all. One of the most impressive things about A Moveable Feast is how sure he is, how hopeful it all seems, and how much fun it all is.

Even at the end, Hemingway could still do it. ...more

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Dec 11, 2007 Kirk rated it it was amazing

Shelves: essential-reference

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-recr ...more

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Jan 21, 2014 J.L. Sutton rated it really liked it · review of another edition

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway presents vivid and interesting observations on his days struggling to make it in post WWI Paris. Interacting with other writers described by Gertrude Stein as being members of the lost generation, A Moveable Feast shows a young Hemingway defining himself as a different kind of writer. The connections to The Sun Also Rises are readily apparent. However, Hemingway’s thoughts about art and his writing are relevant to all his novels and short stories. This is an ...more

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Jan 01, 2008 Larissa rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2008, vicarious-travel, english-usa, short-stories

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 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. ...more

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Jun 13, 2018 David Schaafsma rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: auto-bio-memoir, writing-books

“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.”

“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”

I love Ernest Hemingway as a writer, at his best, especially in many of the stories, but in the main novels, too, there is often breathtakingly good writing. Then there are the books, some of them much later, where ...more

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Oct 07, 2019 Nat K rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-memoir, novella, paris, bookclub-2019, 2019-books, re-reads

"We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other."

A memoir of Hemingway's time spent as a young, unknown writer in 1920s Paris.

This is very sensory based writing. References abound to food and drink and the change of seasons in Paris. You can feel what it's like to be living in poverty as a practically starving artist. And yet there are other ways to be fed. Intellectually and emotionally.

Hem talks of the many books he devoured, of viewing
"We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other."

A memoir of Hemingway's time spent as a young, unknown writer in 1920s Paris.

This is very sensory based writing. References abound to food and drink and the change of seasons in Paris. You can feel what it's like to be living in poverty as a practically starving artist. And yet there are other ways to be fed. Intellectually and emotionally.

Hem talks of the many books he devoured, of viewing paintings by the masters Cezanne, Manet, Monet on a daily basis. The interesting conversations he had with people such as Gertrude Stein & Ford Maddox Ford. His friendships with F Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. Hem's (first) wife Hadley is by his side, on the periphery, not quite partaking in his literary world and artistic friendships. Yet none of this matters as they are in love. And in Paris.

The book is split into vignettes, each one focussed on a different aspect of their life in Paris. There are many caustic observations about his fellow writers and friends. Biting. Undoubtedly they felt likewise toward Hem. He talks openly of their drinking and relationship problems. But what would a memoir be without some good old fashioned sniping.

It's interesting to note that while Hem & his inner circle were by and large very poor, they still managed to head out to the local cafe daily and have a drink. Or two. Give or take. I don't recall noticing this the first time around.

Is this told with rose-coloured glasses stuck firmly in place? Probably. But then all the best memories are, aren't they.

This is my second reading of this book, after a distance of many years. Bookclub was continuing the Hem fest (we'd previously read Paula McLain's "The Paris Wife"). It still held interest for me. A good book to tuck into when you have an arvo free.

"Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was when we were very poor and very happy." ...more

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Dec 13, 2015 Glenn Sumi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, classics, nobel-winners, non-fiction

Memoir… or fiction? It doesn’t matter with this amusing classic, a series of poignant and light vignettes about the author’s time as a poor, struggling writer in 1920s Paris.

Hem (as people refer to him in the book) offers up clear, unfussy portraits of everyone from salon-mistress/tastemaker Gertrude Stein and Shakespeare & Co’s generous owner, Sylvia Beach, to a snobbish, forgetful Ford Madox Ford and a nasty Wyndham Lewis, whom he compares to “toe-jam.”

I especially liked the couple of chapters ...more

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Oct 09, 2017 Vanessa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Ernest Hemingway. A big name in the literary game. I was always hesitant to read him. Mainly due to his book titles, they never really grabbed me, feeling masculine and daunting. I thought he was a author I would struggle to connect with. How wrong I was. This retrospective memoir of his early writing life in Paris as an expatriate set in the 20’s was a great place to start, getting a good sense of Ernest as a young man before his fame as a well loved author.

There’s so much beauty and wonder in ...more

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Mar 29, 2014 Carmen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Anyone

Shelves: non-fiction, classics, he-says, traditionally-published

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Well, this book was amazing. I was rather trepidatious, but it turned out to be excellent.

People who interfered with your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted su ...more

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Aug 18, 2013 Diane rated it really liked it

Shelves: memoirs, classics, france, writers-on-writing

To paraphrase ol' Hem, "This is a fine and true book. It is honest and good, and the stories are important and just."

Hem, as I shall forever call him now, wrote this memoir just a few years before he died in 1961. It's about Hem and his first wife, Hadley, when they were young and poor in Paris in the '20s, and Hem would borrow books from the famous Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, and he would go to cafes to write.

While there are stories about other writers in Paris at the time -- such as F. Scott To paraphrase ol' Hem, "This is a fine and true book. It is honest and good, and the stories are important and just."

Hem, as I shall forever call him now, wrote this memoir just a few years before he died in 1961. It's about Hem and his first wife, Hadley, when they were young and poor in Paris in the '20s, and Hem would borrow books from the famous Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, and he would go to cafes to write.

While there are stories about other writers in Paris at the time -- such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Ford Madox Ford -- much of the book is Hem talking about writing itself, which was interesting. He would sometimes worry that he couldn't write anymore and would have to reason with himself:

"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

My favorite story was a bizarre trip to Lyon that Hem took with Fitzgerald, who drank too much and became convinced that he was dying. There's a funny scene of Hem pretending to take Scott's temperature with a bath thermometer, and then plotting how to get Scott to stop drinking. "You could not be angry with Scott any more than you could be angry with someone who was crazy, but I was getting angry with myself for having become involved in the whole silliness."

Later, Hem meets Zelda, Scott's unbalanced and demanding wife, and understands why Scott has so much trouble being able to write.

Hem also has some amusing stories about Gertrude Stein, with whom he had a prickly friendship: "There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers." (Having read and not liked Stein's memoir "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," I say that she was ambitious but not necessarily great.)

Overall, I greatly enjoyed spending time with Hem, even though I'm sure some of the stories were exaggerated. In the preface, Hem wrote: "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact."

Finally, I want to honor the cleverness of the title, which came from a letter Hem wrote to a friend in 1950: "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." ...more

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Oct 14, 2016 Annelies rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, non-contemporary-american

Yes, I know, this is a high rating. But I did really enjoy reading this book. It was like I was with Hemingway in Paris in the twenties. It really came to live before my eyes. I think it has much to to with his manner of writing. Very clear sentences, not a word to much but it captures all he has to say without much frivolity. He wrote this book at the end of his life so he really mastered this very own style of writing and which I like so much.

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Dec 05, 2018 Adam Dalva rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Charming, ranging, generous, memoir of Paris, stuffed full of memorable lines ("Never Any End to Paris") and packed with the luminaries of the expat era. How weird to read a book where Joyce is just sort of around, where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas squabble, and where, in an excellent moment, Fitzgerald's face turns into a death mask while drunk. All along, Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley is at once extolled and mourned. I read the Restored Edition, which in some ways I regret, especial ...more

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Apr 18, 2012 Eric rated it did not like it

Shelves: peteredout

I decided to bail after his visit to the indoor bicycle races, like dance marathons one of those frantic displays of recreational endurance so popular in the 1920s. A quick comparing look at Joseph Roth’s account of a night at Berlin’s tracked bicycle races, in What I Saw, convinced me that I was wasting my time with Hemingway. There are better books. Hemingway’s style will always strike me as more or less mannered and ridiculous, but what I read of A Moveable Feast was especially bad—solemn, po ...more

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Sep 27, 2018 Sean Barrs rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 3-star-reads, modernist-movement

The Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is an intriguing read.

It’s an odd little novel, more biography than fiction. Hemingway recollects his youth, the days where he had no money and lived from story to story before he had his first major novelistic breakthrough.

The reader that will take most from this will be one that has read a lot of 20th century literature and is aware of the interactions between writers and the ways in which they supported each other through their careers. Ezra Pound was a ...more

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Mar 25, 2008 Brad rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: faves, classic, hemingway, to-read-again, memoir, autobiography, travel, novel-in-short-stories

A Moveable Feast is a beautiful book. Gorgeous. The prose is Hemingway-crisp, concise and evocative, but even with the Ezra Pound love fest midway through the book (fascinatingly against the grain in an America predisposed to loathe the poet for his ties to Nazism), A Moveable Feast isn’t A Moveable Feast until Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda appear on the scene.

Fans of Fitzgerald’s probably cringe at Papa’s descriptions of the Scott’s sad debasement. Zelda is a mad bitch; Scott is a drunken man-chi ...more

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Sep 22, 2015 Perry rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Ils fête dans Paris, par exemple: jauger du pénis (une obsession du Américains), un Ford avec mauvaise échappement, and the "mama of dada" (Gertrude Stein)

Published posthumously in 1964 (3 years after Papa died), this somewhat scattered memoir covers his years as a young writer living in Paris. You may already know the title comes from a passage in the book, "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 Pari ...more

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Jul 07, 2020 CarolynMarieReads rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics-i-ve-read, all-time-favorites, read-books-i-own

Hemingway’s true and original foreword to A Moveable Feast: “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”

Ernest Hemingway passed away before he could write a final chapter or even title this book, so it was left up to Mary Hemingway, his fourth wife, to give the book a title. She remembered hearing her husband once say to a friend, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, th Hemingway’s true and original foreword to A Moveable Feast: “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”

Ernest Hemingway passed away before he could write a final chapter or even title this book, so it was left up to Mary Hemingway, his fourth wife, to give the book a title. She remembered hearing her husband once say to a friend, “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.”

After reading that, I could not imagine the book being titled anything else. A “feast” can be an allusion to religious feasts, but it can also be seen as a “feast of life,” as in your supreme happiness. Living your life as if you’re eating a great feast. The term “moveable” is a bit more straightforward; wherever you go, that feeling of “supreme happiness” goes with you.

Personally, I’ve been dreaming of traveling to Paris for years. I have also been an admirer of Hemingway’s writing for many years as well. Put both of them together, set during the roaring 20’s, and you’ve got my perfect book! This book truly felt like a moveable feast, literally and figuratively. While reading, I kept having this feeling like I was peeking into the keyhole of a door. That door belonged to Ernest Hemingway, and on the other side I could see the Paris of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and many more of my literary and artists idols. Sadly, Time itself locked this imaginary door from the inside. Even though I couldn’t walk into the room, I had my ear to the door in such a way that I could hear everything. Ultimately, these words are a portal to Hemingway’s 1920’s Paris disguised as a simple book. As Hemingway says on page 18, “...I entered far into the story and was lost in it.”

We as the readers not only get an intimate portrait of Ernest Hemingway himself, but also a select group of people he was in contact with. My personal favorite was discovering how Hemingway viewed his close friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He wrote a preface before one of the chapters about Fitzgerald that says, “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on butterfly’s wings…” He continues this stunning simile by revealing the wings flaws, and by doing so “Scott’s” own faults. He ends by saying, “He was flying again and I was lucky to meet him just after a good time in his writing if not a good one in his life.” Hemingway even describes reading The Great Gatsby for the first time, and being put off by the cover. On the dust jacket, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg disturbed him so much he confessed, “I took it off to read the book.” This was one of those moments while reading where I felt like I was peeking through the door’s keyhole. I watched Ernest Hemingway take the dust jacket off and face it down on his table.

The most intriguing and heartbreaking aspect of their friendship was discovering, through Hemingway’s eyes, just how much mental suffering Fitzgerald went through. I have always known he was an alcoholic, and his wife Zelda tended to “act out” in a way. Hemingway always suspected it was out of jealousy. These firsthand accounts felt like “Ernest” was telling me the secrets of his friend’s life in ultimate confidence.

My favorite aspect of this book was watching “Hem,” as some people call him, go about his everyday life: writing, traveling, walking to cafes… These little snatches of time felt even more personal. He’s bringing us into these scenes to not only tell the story of his life, but also to show us who he truly was. This is one of my favorite lines from the book, “... we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.” From the outside this moment is quite simple, but it’s within the so-called “simple moments” where I find the greatest artistry.

Another image that I completely fell in love with was while Hemingway sat writing in a cafe. “...when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.” There really isn’t anything groundbreaking about this scene, but after I read it, I had this overpowering need to paint this image. I could see the saucer in my mind, I pictured it being white with a simple trim, and the beige pencil shavings curled all around the matching white cup holding his “cafe au lait.”

This “restored edition” has many alternative endings, because Hemingway kept rewriting it. He passed away before doing any final edits, but his grandson Sean Hemingway picked up the pencil that his grandfather put down. He reworked the original version of A Moveable Feast into its truest form, and I can only imagine how touched Ernest Hemingway would be if he saw his legacy living on. Afterall, Hemingway says on page 22, “I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and go on from there.” I can’t help but feel that this book in its entirety is the truest sentence Hemingway knew. ...more

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Feb 04, 2017 Cathrine ☯️ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: group-challenge

4.25★
“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.”

Published posthumously, according to forewards by Ernest Hemingway’s son and grandson this restored edition is truer to the author’s vision than the original text overseen by his fourth wife. He ended his life before choosing a beginning, an ending, and a title. Some of his memories were damaged or missing due to the electric shoc 4.25★
“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.”

Published posthumously, according to forewards by Ernest Hemingway’s son and grandson this restored edition is truer to the author’s vision than the original text overseen by his fourth wife. He ended his life before choosing a beginning, an ending, and a title. Some of his memories were damaged or missing due to the electric shock therapy he had undergone. According to son Patrick these were some of his dad’s last professional notes: “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”

The setting is Paris after WWI and each chapter is a snapshot of memories when he and wife Hadley “would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.” He hung out with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce when they were all so very young and poor and not so famous. He went to the museum often and “learned something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.” At night as the lights come on, people are “hurrying to some place to drink together, to eat together and then to make love.” . . . “Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary…” Friends, you knew a wine quote was coming right?

It’s been 35 years since I read all my Hemingways. There were low expectations on my part for an incomplete manuscript but needing to take a virtual trip to France for a group reading challenge I thought this might do. It sure did, and then some. I was surprised by how much I loved it and up until I had finished would have told you “No, I’ve never been to Paris.”
His prose made me want to go back and maybe do some rereading but I cannot reconcile myself to his love of bullfighting and big game hunting which was absent in these recollections.

**Note: This version had additional material following the main text which was sourced from ten additional chapters in varying stages of completion which Hemingway felt should not be included (deciding less would be more). I chose to read it as he intended and so left off where he did leaving them unread. Anyone who has ever wanted more of Hem might be thrilled to read them. ...more

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Sep 01, 2018 Richard Derus rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Recommended to Richard by: P.E.

Real Rating: 2.5* of five

I am not a Hemingway fan. Next to D.H. Lawrence and Ivy Compton-Burnett, he's my least favorite English-language writer. This sly, arch memoir of Paris in the 1920s contains unkind and unflattering portraits of people who were kind to Hemingway back in the day, as well as some deeply homophobic stuff that reveals the author's life-long anxiety about his own sexuality. He was quite pretty in his youth:

He was always hostile towards "otherness" and I suspect, given how vivi Real Rating: 2.5* of five

I am not a Hemingway fan. Next to D.H. Lawrence and Ivy Compton-Burnett, he's my least favorite English-language writer. This sly, arch memoir of Paris in the 1920s contains unkind and unflattering portraits of people who were kind to Hemingway back in the day, as well as some deeply homophobic stuff that reveals the author's life-long anxiety about his own sexuality. He was quite pretty in his youth:

He was always hostile towards "otherness" and I suspect, given how vividly Manly his pursuits were, that they sprang in part from his anger and fear at being pigeonholed as "arty" or "an artist" which was code for queer in that time. He even turned on famously Sapphic Gertude Stein, whose aperçu "Ernie's remarks do not constitute literature" is the single best thing in her own tediously overwrought ouevre, and still whose support for him in his initial Parisian foray was key to his success.

So my response to this book, read after the extraordinarily excellent The Sun Also Rises and his uniformly good, frequently excellent, short fiction, came off badly in my eyes. (I dislike The Old Man and the Sea almost but not quite as much as Sons and Lovers and slightly more than Manservant and Maidservant, both perfectly horrible books.) I won't read the bits of his ouevre I've escaped, and I don't recommend him to you as a reader. I actively, forcefully discourage you from reading his work if you're an aspiring writer. The temptation to emulate his style *must*be*resisted* because, trust me on this!, you cannot reach its heights.

I don't like his stuff but I do acknowledge his hugely effortful and massively talented foray into stylistic innovation.

I suspect, though I cannot prove, that Hemingway won't survive the ages. I'm not at all sure novels will survive the ages as a means of consuming stories. It seems to me that the storytelling medium to beat is, and will continue to be as it grows and refines itself, video/computer games. Their complexity and their sheer scope quite overpowers mere imagination-driven reading. Novels will be as dead as poetry is.

O brave new world.... ...more

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Oct 19, 2010 Sue rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: france, bio-memoir, read-2013, classics, library-book

Read immediately after The Paris Wife, this is like a book end on the 1920s in Paris, a photo of a writer's life in writing, as a husband and father, as a member of the ex-patriot community in Europe. There are glimpses of his writing process, his friendships (or maybe more properly relationships) with other writers, artists and luminaries large and small, his apparent love for his son and wife.

All is masked as fiction but reads as real life. There are quotes upon quotes to mention.

"I thought o ...more

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Dec 22, 2016 Thomas rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-or-memoir, read-for-college, nonfiction

What a fitting book for my final Hemingway review. A Moveable Feast captures so much of what I like about Hemingway (e.g., his staunch commitment to writing, his honest portrayal of emotion) and what I abhor about him (e.g., his sexism, his homophobia, his racism). He has a rather entrancing and pretentious way of writing about Paris, its luxuries and its famous people he often associated with (Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, just to name a few). Yet, between this glitz and ...more

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Oct 10, 2008 James Spina rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Ernie's great and not-so-great grandchildren

I'm heading for Paris on a work related trip in a few weeks so I thought I'd get in the mood by dipping into papa. BIG MISTAKE. I guess you had to be there. This is nothing but a bunch of mundane moments strung together by some boring name dropping and squalid hygiene habits.
I've never really been a fan of anything other than Ernie's shorter stories and now I remember why. He didn't write briefly for effect. He did it because he didn't really know enough words. It always sounds like he's peeking ...more

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Feb 24, 2016 Darwin8u rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

description

I writing this at a resort, nestled against the Catalina Mountains in Tucson, AZ. I am warm, well-fed,and happy. This book peaks for me with its perspectives on Paris post World War I (think Fitzgerald, Stein, Joyce, Pound, etc.). I struggle with its form. I am ...more

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Feb 17, 2013 Cheryl rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: memoirs, europe, vintage, on-writing, mesmerizing, non-fiction, global-intrigue

I started this book calling him Ernest Hemingway. Midway, my friends pointed out that I was referring to him as Hem. By the end, I knew never to refer to him as Ernest. More please...more nonfiction/memoir from Hem, if only it existed (some say there's more that was never published??...)

This book was an intimate portrait of Hemingway. I was never a big fan of his fiction: though his simple, deliberate, sentence structuring still leave me in awe, I've never really been a fan of the flow of his st I started this book calling him Ernest Hemingway. Midway, my friends pointed out that I was referring to him as Hem. By the end, I knew never to refer to him as Ernest. More please...more nonfiction/memoir from Hem, if only it existed (some say there's more that was never published??...)

This book was an intimate portrait of Hemingway. I was never a big fan of his fiction: though his simple, deliberate, sentence structuring still leave me in awe, I've never really been a fan of the flow of his stories. But even Hemingway admitted struggling with novels--he was the short story guy who was trying to piece it all together. He wrote "The Sun Also Rises," in six weeks, then spent months trying to put it into novel format. F Scott Fitzgerald wanted to help him edit but he refused because he wasn't thrilled about letting anyone other than his editors read it during the draft stage.

Speaking of Fitzgerald--what great insight you get about Scott and Zelda. Zelda was a case, let's just say that. You also get to read about Ezra Pound, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ronald Firbank, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Walsh, and more. What about the females? I had to remind myself that it was the 1920s. Though you do see him interact with Gertrude Stein (though she's not portrayed in a good way), you hear a mention of Katherine Mansfield (not in a good way either), quick mention of Karen Blixen (who he thought wrote the best book he had read about Africa) and Hadley (his wife) and the loving thoughts he had of her as he foreshadows their demise--making it clear that it was all his fault.

"But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."

I felt as if I was breathing the same air as I read what he wrote, you could see the vulnerability, see his descriptions clearly, walk through Paris with him--cheers to young, up-and-coming writers in Paris (as if those days he describes still exist). He was poor, writing during the day, socializing and drinking at night (yay, writer stereotype) struggling with his writing, and upset whenever anyone talked about it to his face or told him he was a good writer. Pay that no mind though, because he makes it clear that he knows he didn't have the best attitude, he had a temper and somewhat of an obnoxious outlook.

I enjoyed the personal rants, the writer who quit journalism to focus on his dream of writing fiction, but every now and then, he realizes how poor he is, and goes off on himself: "I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly. I should have bought a large piece of bread and eaten it instead of skipping a meal. I could taste the brown lovely crust. But it is dry in your mouth without something to drink...You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord."

There were lessons littered throughout this book for writers. If you were to say Hemingway was imparting one in particular, it would be this perhaps, what he told himself when he couldn't start a story: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." ...more

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Sep 18, 2011 Teresa rated it really liked it

This memoir (Hemingway coyly says in the preface that the reader may consider it fiction), with its idyllic tone, surely romanticizes Hemingway's life in France with his first wife and their child. It includes rather unflattering portraits of Stein, Madox Ford, and the Fitzgeralds, while certainly leaving out things that would've made Hemingway himself look bad. But, perhaps, it is as he says here of his fiction writing: what is omitted is what strengthens the story.

I enjoyed the style; the sto ...more

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About Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collec Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature.

Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, and after high school he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent, and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s "Lost Generation" expatriate community. The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's first novel, was published in 1926.

After his 1927 divorce from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from Spanish Civil War where he had acted as a journalist, and after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. They separated when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II; during which he was present at the Normandy Landings and liberation of Paris.

Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in two plane crashes that left him in pain and ill-health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961. ...more

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Quotes from A Moveable Feast

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.” — 1935 likes

“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.” — 1082 likes

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