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A Moveable Feast
by
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
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Paperback, 211 pages
Published
May 29th 1996
by Simon & Schuster
(first published 1964)
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”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

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

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

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
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

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
...more

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

'We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply
and slept well and warm together and loved each other'
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 m ...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-recr ...more
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

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

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
...more

Jun 13, 2018
Dave Schaafsma
rated it
liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
writing-books,
auto-bio-memoir
“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
“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

"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 ...more


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

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

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 ...more
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 ...more

Oct 14, 2016
Annelies
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
non-contemporary-american,
classics
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.

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
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

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

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

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
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

Paris is a celebration, is a hymn to life, to friendship, to the creation and a magnificent tribute to Paris.
Woody Allen's last film "Midnight in Paris" led me to re-read this excellent author, who is Ernest Hemingway. Here it is a minor work, but which reveals all the talent of its author.
Here he evokes his first stay in Paris in the 1920s, in the company of his first wife, Hadley.
A financially difficult stay, poor in income but oh so rich in joie de vivre, in discoveries, in friendship.
We trav ...more
Woody Allen's last film "Midnight in Paris" led me to re-read this excellent author, who is Ernest Hemingway. Here it is a minor work, but which reveals all the talent of its author.
Here he evokes his first stay in Paris in the 1920s, in the company of his first wife, Hadley.
A financially difficult stay, poor in income but oh so rich in joie de vivre, in discoveries, in friendship.
We trav ...more

Mar 25, 2008
Brad
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
faves,
hemingway,
autobiography,
travel,
classic,
to-read-again,
novel-in-short-stories,
memoir
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
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

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 ...more
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 ...more

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 ...more
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 ...more

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
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

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 ...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.”
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 ...more

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
All is masked as fiction but reads as real life. There are quotes upon quotes to mention.
"I thought o ...more

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

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
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

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 ...more
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 ...more

“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
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
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

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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Goodreads Librari...: Please add cover (and some data) | 2 | 13 | Nov 13, 2019 11:11AM | |
What is meant by the term "MOVEABLE FEAST?" | 19 | 1635 | Oct 01, 2019 09:45PM | |
Paper & Glam Book...: November 2018: A Moveable Feast! | 6 | 99 | Nov 30, 2018 12:55PM | |
A question of spelling | 1 | 11 | Jun 15, 2018 05:58PM |
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
...more
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