A Moveable Feast

Author - Ernest Hemingway ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Scribner was reviewed on 16-Oct-2008.

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1) Hardcover Book A Moveable Feast by Scribner. It seems incredibly vain to write a review of A Moveable Feast. People study it in college, dissertations have been written and PhD.´s awarded. But Amazon gives everybody a shot at anything and if there´s any virtue in that approach, it may be that it allows for small-scale observations like this one:

A person learning to write should read this book attentively. The simple encouragement about writing ´one true sentence´ is good for the soul. Got block? Just write one true sentence: you can and you should. You, writer should also pay attention to the value of writing about something when you are away from it and when you´ve known it well enough.
And then there´s the whole bit about ornament and flourishes. Hemingway says that he cut them all away, but of course that´s the furthest thing from the truth. A Moveable Feast is full of flourishes in the form of details that are sparingly crafted and added to the narrative because they make the whole thing more alive. You might find that you´ve forgotten everything he said about Zelda but remember vividly the details of heating a small rented room in Paris.

It´s hard to read this book without wanting to put it down and tell someone something about a vividly remembered detail of your life: the smell of a clean fuzzy dog or the feeling of standing on the deck of a ship as it goes east through the North Atlantic in winter. And of course, you´ll want to do it with one true sentence.


Lynn Hoffman, author of Bang Bang¤

2) Hardcover Book A Moveable Feast by Scribner. My personal reading of Hemingway has spanned a lifetime. This short "memoir" aside from ´Islands in the Stream´ and ´The Oldman and the Sea´, has to be one of the top ten "must reads" for any Hemingway reader...or any reader.

Why?

A Movable Feast describes that (R)omantic time after WW1 in Paris when creative life exploded in all its forms: Picasso in art, James Joyce, F. S. Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound; surealism, cubism and ultimately expressionism. Writers travelled to Paris or more so, ´gravitated´ to the beautiful city and worked, starved and immersed themselves in their particular art froms.

This is a ´tale´ of the ´Starving Artist´, as Hemingway descibes his hunger - the smells of bread along the small streets, his belly taking over while his mind focuses entirely on food - though the writing continued no matter his lack of food or his beloved drink.

For example: "Chapter 8" "...you got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw a smelled the food." (p. 50)

A Movable Feast is a general description of Hemingway´s experiences without the details of gossip of the famous and infamous people he encountered.

As the author writes at the beginning: "For reasons sufficient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and some were known by everyone and everyone has written about them and will undoubtless write more." (Preface)

Fair enough.

In a biography of James Joyce, and interesting event occurred, (not mentioned in this text). Hemingway, in awe of the Irish genius, invites him to a famous bar which he and Fitzgerald had been drinking since the morning. The dapper Joyce arrives late in the afternoon, reserved as always, when some Parisian ruffian begins to insult Joyce. In true Hemingway character, he duly throws the ruffian out the front window. If memory serves, Joyce promptly bid his adieu and left. This is without doubt Hemingway in true (drunken) character.

This is an unreliable historical document but the perspective of a man writing about a time in his life that has he will never forget because of the time and personalities he met.

One of Hemingway´s best and most entertaining.

In Hemingway´s own words:

"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 movable feast." (A letter to a friend - 1950)
¤

3) Hardcover Book A Moveable Feast by Scribner. Guess what? A lot of people really like Hemingway. There are those who have never studied or even read another great author of the 20th century who has read Hem. This book was published after his death and I wonder if this wasn´t something he wrote for his own kind of fun to attack and belittle everyone he knew in those years. Almost a practice writing exercise with malicious intent: read it carefully, F. Scott is famously viscously trashed but so is every single person he meets. My feeling is that if he was in his right mind - if you were to read anything about his last years he was in very bad shape - he would have destroyed this before he killed himself.¤

4) Hardcover Book A Moveable Feast by Scribner. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway´s memoir of his early days in Paris, is nearly bursting with rich, poignant details of what it was like to be young and hopeful and excited. It´s all there--Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the horse chestnut trees in bloom. Perhaps more than the reminiscenses of actual people and places, however, is Hemingway´s sense of how good it was to be young. At times, you almost feel that Hemingway´s heart was breaking as he recalls the beauty of his youth. Whether the stories are fact or fiction doesn´t matter--Hemingway creates an aching poetry in these lovely, long ago days in Paris.

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets¤

5) Hardcover Book A Moveable Feast by Scribner. This book about Ernest Hemingway is about his life in Paris during the memorable lost generation of writers. I have one hangup about him not writing enough about a close friend, journalist, and fellow writer, Janet "Genet" Flanner from the New Yorker. All he wrote was one sentence. He writes lovingly about Gertrude Stein and leaves out the name of her partner/companion Alice B. Toklas. He had a complicated relationship regarding Stein. He also writes about the lesbians, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, a little about Natalie Clifford Barney also known as the Amazon, and other writers like Ezra Pound. The book is easy to read and is reminiscent about Paris during another time and generation before World War II when America was in the grips of the great depression and writers became expatriates to Paris and Europe much like Hemingway. World War II shattered the lost generation´s control of Parisian expatriates like Hemingway, Flanner, Beach, Stein and Toklas. He describes Paris as a moveable feast but you could be poor and happy in Paris while struggling to be a writer. I think it´s when Hemingway was the happiest along with the others. The phrase of "all good things come to an end" suits the lost generation of writers like Hemingway. They never found the happiness again.¤

6) Hardcover Book A Moveable Feast by Scribner. "You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."

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 landscape: Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist forms; James Joyce, long living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin, had just completed Ulysses; Gertude Stein held court at 27 rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of rue génération perdue; and T. S. Eliot was a bank clerk in London. It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished young writer gathered the material for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.

Among these small, reflective sketches are unforgettable encounters with the members of Hemingway´s slightly rag-tag circle of artists and writers, some also fated to achieve fame and glory, others to fall into obscurity. Here, too, is an evocation of the Paris that Hemingway knew as a young man -- a map drawn in his distinct prose of the streets and cafés and bookshops that comprised the city in which he, as a young writer, sometimes struggling against the cold and hunger of near poverty, honed the skills of his craft.

A Moveable Feast is at once an elegy to the remarkable group of expatriates that gathered in Paris during the twenties and a testament to the risks and rewards of the writerly life.¤

7) Hardcover Book A Moveable Feast by Scribner. In the preface to A Moveable Feast, Hemingway remarks casually that "if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction"--and, indeed, fact or fiction, it doesn´t matter, for his slim memoir of Paris in the 1920s is as enchanting as anything made up and has become the stuff of legend. Paris in the ´20s! Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, lived happily on $5 a day and still had money for drinks at the Closerie des Lilas, skiing in the Alps, and fishing trips to Spain. On every corner and at every café table, there were the most extraordinary people living wonderful lives and telling fantastic stories. Gertrude Stein invited Hemingway to come every afternoon and sip "fragrant, colorless alcohols" and chat admid her great pictures. He taught Ezra Pound how to box, gossiped with James Joyce, caroused with the fatally insecure Scott Fitzgerald (the acid portraits of him and his wife, Zelda, are notorious). Meanwhile, Hemingway invented a new way of writing based on this simple premise: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."

Hemingway beautifully captures the fragile magic of a special time and place, and he manages to be nostalgic without hitting any false notes of sentimentality. "This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," he concludes. Originally published in 1964, three years after his suicide, A Moveable Feast was the first of his posthumous books and remains the best. --David Laskin¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 13-Nov-2008, 06848336389780684833637, 210-690-560-810-380-230-340-8

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