A Moveable Feast
Reviews
Really don't know what the fuss was about for this book. Can think of a lot of other Hemingway books I've much preferred. And the name dropping just doesn't do much for me.
Ernest Hemingway was married to Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, his first wife, from 1921 to 1926. They lived in Paris during that time. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's posthumous memoir covers this time in his life. This short and fascinating book has two contradictory introductions; one by Hemingway's final wife, Mary and one by Ernest himself. Mary, who edited the book after his death, describes how her husband wrote the book and what is covered in the book. Ernest Hemingway's introduction tells the reader to consider the book a work of fiction! So which is it? It's probably both. The book covers historical events and real people (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound among others). But it was written from 40 year old memories and comes without footnotes or other documentation. Memories are fleeting and subject to augmentation whether intentional or not. Finally, Mary apparently did a fairly heavy editing job on it, significantly changing the tone of the memoir. Her edits may have turned fact into fiction. Does A Moveable Feast's dubious status matter? No. It's still a fascinating portrait of the early years of Ernest Hemingway's career. It still shows Hemingway's wit. Hemingway's description of his fellow writers is worth the read just to see them described as actual human beings.
The story revolves around Paris. Where Hemingway met lots of influential people that affect his whole life and career, in a whole magical place.
One of my favorite parts was a passage that described being on a writing-roll by him narrating from inside the scene, and you don't realize what he's doing until his writing gets interrupted. At first it wasn't clear, but when I realized what he was doing I got excited. I reread the passage, then read it aloud to N, and only then did I get enough of it to continue with the chapter. Most of his name-dropping was lost on me, save for the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein (whose name I recognize only because she was a friend of Hemingway's); because I didn't know them, his anecdotes and descriptions would fall a little flat. When he wrote about normal people, however, like his favorite waiter, they came to life. And naturally his descriptions of Paris itself were fantastic, written with true love and affection.
His fiction is masculine in a way I can't really enjoy. This, however, has enough wine and food and sassy descriptions of author friends (and frenemies) to gloss over his less charming qualities. It's a brief 200 pages. There is a lot of a wine, a lot of rain, and more horse racing than is prudent.
If you are interested in the writing process, in 20's Paris life, in ex-pats living abroad, in Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, I recommend this. The chapters are vignettes whose order is discussed in the forward, but there isn't a narrative thread running through them.
"There is never any end to Paris"
I travel to Paris in a week and reading this has me even more desperate to soak in the beauty and the art. Bohemian Paris, the writers and the artists, sounds like a very magical time indeed. Hemingway's style is to the point and blunt, but still so incredibly readable and I loved that about this work of non-fiction.
Turkish translation is a bit problematic, tough.
نصيحة: لا تبدأ أبدا القراءة لمؤلف بسيرته الذاتية. سأحاول قراءة أعمالك الأخرى عزيزي هيمنجواي ثم أعيد قراءة تلك الوليمة، لعلها تكون أشهى :) Merged review: نصيحة: لا تبدأ أبدا القراءة لمؤلف بسيرته الذاتية. سأحاول قراءة أعمالك الأخرى عزيزي هيمنجواي ثم أعيد قراءة تلك الوليمة، لعلها تكون أشهى :)
I really enjoyed this. The way that Hem writes makes me feel like I know him. It's incredibly direct with no embellishments at all, but when there is an emotional moment it hits quite hard. There is one line that will stick with me forever.
This would be 4.5 stars but in the absence of halves, I’m rounding up without hesitation. I’ve read a lot of Hemingway over the years - most because I had to, and a few because I wanted to. My experience with his writing growing up was that I knew it was beautiful and important, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was that made me feel that way, or what, exactly, the important things were. A Moveable Feast clarified for me that it was the things that were left out were the ones that were so important, tugging at me just past the corner of my eyes on the page, and in most cases I just hadn’t lived enough life or paid attention to the lives that many others have lived to realize what they were. Everyone knows the stripped, no-frills brevity that Hemingway’s famous for, but it was a wonderful experience to read this meditation on life, and mistakes made, and writing done and not done, and then feel a flood rush of all the things pouring into the gaps and omissions of his works past that still hang around in my brain caves. I also diverge from a lot of the popular opinion on this book, and I’m not sure if it’s my loss or others’: 1. All of my favorite stories were the ones that happened outside Paris (especially the ones in Schruns and the amazing sketch of him and a crazy-ass Fitzgerald driving back from Lyon) 2. remark how Hemingway was stone cold; I found him just about as vulnerable and emotionally spring-loaded as one could ever be (underneath one thin layer that is very easy to peep under if you’re trying to be perceptive). 3. Reviews and criticism I kept finding said Hemingway was never funny; I found some of the lines in this story were LOL-hilarious (please read An Agent of Evil and his description of Ralph Dunning Cheever simply as “a poet who smoked opium and forgot to eat). 4. My very favorite chapter, which completely floored me and had me pausing every 30 seconds and muttering “holy sh*t YES that’s it” is, according to every single person in the universe that I can find on the internet except for me, about something COMPLETELY different than what I think it is about. I can’t delve into this anymore in case I’m on the verge of the biggest literary Hemingway-related revelation of all time and I’m going to become a famous well-respected berjillionaire because of it (because literary critics are obviously all extremely rich and famous) so sorry but you’ll have to try and figure out the mystery for yourself. Hemingway’s writing on life and Paris and travel is beautiful, his honesty about both the limitations and possibility of the individual human memory is beautiful, and his writing on writing itself is beautiful. I love Ernest and, though I had very different opinions in some areas, I agree with the masses that he was a beautiful, broken man who was both larger than life and always doomed and destined to write.
Some parts were duller than I remembered, others still totally dazzling. No one describes a better lunch. 🦪🥂
Ah! Paris! And to be young! And well-connected. And good-looking. And just a master at whatever you do. And not hindered by rules or held down by a wife and child. But to have that wife and child if you want them. But mostly - just Paris! And a good Apéritif. Or maybe two. Or several. And to go off racing! And not call it gambling! And to be so much better than, what was his name again? That Fitzgerald guy - with the crazy wife and the tiny penis? Oh well! And so glad to have that cat to do the baby sitting if needed. Because we were so poor. I know - I gave it it high rating because I liked it. I can still make fun of it.
Hermosa historia. La empece a leer después de ver la película Midnight in Paris, y me enamoro totalmente.
Oh my oh my “When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. the only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. people were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.” I loved the book and beyond happy that it’s my first read in 2019 💫 Hemingway and the vivid picture he creates when he talks about Paris <3 he makes me feel like I’m right there; breathing the same air, admiring the beautiful winter light on the streets and holding a cup of coffee to keep me warm~ Also, I did cry on the last couple of pages when he talked about Hadley and his never ending love for her :’>
Me he vuelto a reencontrar con Hemingway y ha sido precioso.
This book is so romantic. And I don't mean that it's about romance so much, per say, but that it makes one fall in love with Paris, and makes me want to take a time machine straight to Hemingway's front doorstep and force him to let me follow him around. all. the. time.
It took two pages until I was hooked. Five later and I wanted to move to Paris. This is not really a story so much as a meandering observation, but the language is amazing, and the world it portrays is alluring. I'm sad it's over.
Highlights
We both touched wood on the café table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this café table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.
He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
When I was writing […] that fed it.
„My,“ she said […] knock on too
There were so many kinds of racing. The straight sprints raced in heats or in match races where the two riders would balance for long seconds on their machines for the advantage of making the other rider take the lead and then the slow circling and the final plunge into the driving purity of speed. There were the programs of the team races of two hours, with a series of pure sprints in their heats to fill the afternoon, the lonely absolute speed events of one man racing an hour against the clock, the terribly dangerous and beautiful races of one hundred kilometers on the big banked wooden five- hundred-meter bowl of the Stade Buffalo, the outdoor stadium at Montrouge where they raced behind big motorcycles, Linart, the great Belgian champion that they called 'the Sioux' for his profile, dropping his head to suck up cherry brandy from a rubber tube that connected with a hot water botle under his racing shirt when he needed it toward the end as he increased his savage speed, and the championships of France behind big motors of the six-hundred-and-sixty- meter cement track of the Parc du Prince near Auteuil, the wickedest track of all where we saw that great rider Ganay fall and heard his skull crumple under the crash helmet as you crack an hard-boiled egg against a stone to peel it on a picnic.
My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries. These were fragrant, colorless alcohols served from cut-glass carafes in small glasses and whether they were questsche, mirabelle or framboise they all tasted like the fruits they came from, converted into a controlled fire on your your tongue that warmed you and loosened it.
Finally towards spring there was the great glacier run, smooth and straight, forever straight if our legs could hold it, our ankles locked, we running so low, leaning into the speed, dropping forever and forever in the silent hiss of the crisp powder. It was better than any flying or anything else, and we built the ability to do it and to have it with the long climbs carrying the heavy rucksacks. We could not buy the trip up nor take a ticket to the top. It was the end we worked for all winter, and all the winter built to make it possible.
I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters' huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefuly to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.