Customer Reviews

A Moveable Feast

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Whenever friends ask me why, at my age, I still love Hemingway, I smile and think about this book. They say "Hemingway' and conjure up familiar visions of the older, bloated and blighted boozer bragging about his macho accomplishments in the world of war and sports, while I consider the young Hemingway in Paris. I am thinking of a much younger, intellectually virile man, someone far more alert, aware and alive; Hemingway as a `moveable feast' strolling deliberately through the streets of a rain-swept Paris on a quiet Monday morning, heading to a café for some café au lait to begin his long day's labor.

In this single, slim tome Hemingway beautifully and unforgettably evokes a world of beauty and innocence now so utterly lost and irretrievable both to himself, through his fame, alcohol, and dissipation, but also to us, for Paris as she was in the 1920s was a place made to order for the lyrical descriptive songs he sings about her in this remembrance; endlessly interesting, instantly unforgettable, and also accessible to the original "starving young artist types" so well depicted here. As anyone visiting Paris today knows, that magical time and place has utterly vanished. Tragically, Paris is just another city these days.

Yet this is a book that unforgettably captures the essence of what the word 'romance' means, and does so in the spare and laconic style that Hemingway developed while sitting in the bistros and watching as the world in all its colors and hues flowed by him. The stories he tells are filled with the kinds of people one usually meets only in novels, yet because of who they were and who they later became in the world of arts and letters, it is hard to doubt the veracity or honesty he uses to such advantage here. This is a portrait of an artist in full possession of his creative powers, full of the vinegary spirit and insight that made him a legend in his own time, and consequently ruined him as an artist and as a human being. There are few books I would endorse for everyone as a lifelong friend. This, however, is a book I can recommend for anyone who wants the reading enjoyment and intellectual experience Hemingway offers in such wonderful abundance in these pages.

Take my advice, though. Buy it first in paper, read it until it begins to fray and fall apart (and you will), and then go out and buy yourself a new hardcover edition to adorn your shelf, so on that proverbial rainy afternoon when the house is quiet, the kids are gone, and you just want to escape from the ordinary ennui and humdrum of life, pull "A Moveable Feast" down and hold it close enough to read. A cup of steaming tea by your side, return all by yourself to a marvelous world of blue city skyscapes, freshly washed cobblestone and unforgettable romance; return once more to Paris in the twenties, when life was simple, basic, and good.

This book could very well be the best of Hemingway.

A Moveable Feast was published after Hemingway's death and many feel that he would never have wanted it published. I'm very glad they did. It is a memoir of Hemingway's time in Paris during the 1920's. During that time he and his first wife, Hadley, lived on $5.00 a day.

I first heard of this book in the movie, City of Angels (Nicholas Cage, Meg Ryan). In it, Cage reads a quote from it to Ryan. The quote interested me and I bought the book. I was amazed.

The characters in this book are extroridnary including everyone from Ezra Pound to Aleister Crowley. He narrates stories including F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda that are so acidic they almost hurt to read.

Hemingway was at his best when he wrote this book. It is a memoir of an aging man looking back on a very happy time in his life. Its a great place to start for Hemingway beginners and a touching read for Hemingway veterans.

There are three perfect little books in 20th century English literature: The Good Soldier, by Ford, The Moviegoer, by Percy, and this sparse narrative written in Hemingway's familiar and still powerful limpid prose. There are descriptions here of many literary figures in Paris during the twenties and the famous cuts at Ford and Fitzgerald, but these are not reasons to read this book. You read this book to hear Hemingway speak to you with his guard down, as you cannot otherwise hear him except in the early Nick Adams stories. He is sitting at his typewriter in Ketchum, his great gifts chased from him by alcohol and hubris, and he remembers when he still had it, when he was poor and cold and hungry and he had Hadley, before he became Hemingway, and he types slow, each word pulled from the emptiness to become the next inevitable perfect word, and his words are the shroud over his loss, his bitterness, his grievous fault. This book was not published in Hemingway's lifetime. It was not written for us

Hemingway's writing was always very auto-biographical, but in A Moveable Feast, published after his lifetime and written late in Hem's life, he actually uses real character names in recreating Paris of the 1920's. For any Hemingway fan, or for those interested in first hand accounts of life with Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and others, this is truly a must read.

The book is everything that most late fiction by Hemingway is not. It is lean, romantic, and genuine, without the blustery heroes and stilted dialogue of missed efforts like the dreadful Across the River and Into the Trees.

Here Hemingway looks back fondly on his days with Hadley in Paris, slipping into cafes to sit all day and attempt to write over a cup of coffee. He remembers trips to the racetrack, a hysterical road trip adventure with Fitzgerald to retrieve a car, and other memorable details from the lives of the Lost Generation living abroad. He also takes shots at some so-called friends who turned on him, not passing up on an opportunity to get in the last word. There is some doubt as to whether Hemingway ever wanted this book published, but I am very glad that they did. It is a book to cherish and come back to every couple of years, and it had aged better than anything else Hemingway had written.

My favorite Hemingway work to date. It's haunting, beautiful, spartan, and addicting.

"A Moveable Feast" is one of those books that you keep on your bedside nightstand for when you can't sleep at night. It's a book you keep in your pocket or your bag for when you're traveling and in an unfamiliar place.

As close as Hemingway gets to autobiography - and it's heartbreaking, gratifying, and complex all at once. Don't miss this one. It's like finding an old friend again.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is his only nonfiction work and his first to be published posthumously. A Moveable Feast covers Hemingway's first extended time in Paris in the 20's, as he lives in a cheap apartment with his wife and son, spending his days writing in cafes and socializing with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. It even includes a wild trip to Lyons with Scott Fitzgerald.

Written in the romanticized style of this time period you'll want to hop the next flight to Paris so that you too can live in the moment. Hemingway captures the feeling of Paris in the 1920's perfectly. The carefree life of an artist or writer is enviable. The ease in which they fit into a foreign world, make friends with one another, feed and learn off of one another is truly unique. This book moves at a slow pace, mimicking the lifestyle they lived, and is also very broken, living in the moment much like these artists did. It is particularly interesting to see Hemingway, a literary giant of today, humbled as he struggles to write, never believing he'll be able to write a full novel like Scott Fitzgerald. This is a book you will escape in.

Man...this book was...wow...not at all what I expected. I picked it up for a few cents at a used book store, intrigued by the description of it as "the wild young years of the lost generation in paris". Frankly I was thinking that it was probably going to be something akin to The Sun Also Rises, one of my favorite novels. But wow was I mistaken. Instead it is a memoir of 5 years of Hemingway's life in paris. These are the pre-Sun Also Rises and international fame years. He's a starving artist, living with his wife, Hadley, in the romantic, bohemian Left Bank of Paris. We are treated, and treated is the only word I can use, to many anecdotes of his life writing and socializing with his fellow expatriates. Hemingway gives us amazing portraits of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford (one of the most hilarious characters in his real life story), and, above all in my opinion, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Any literature buff will be in ectasy unimaginable by anyone else. There's an ancedote towards the end of the memoir where Scott Fitzgerald tells Hemingway that Zelda was complaing about his..er..'size'. To convince him that Zelda is just being difficult, Hemingway takes Fitzgerald to the Louvre to see the nudes. You just don't get that anywhere else....

Hemingway's classic lucid and laconic trademark writing style is indeed fully alive and well in the posthumously published A Moveable Feast. A Moveable Feast, the unique term used to describe Paris of the 1920's, reads like The Sun Also Rises - with great dialogue and characters. In fact, in the preface, Hemingway states, "If the reader prefers, this may be regarded as fiction."

Hemingway admits to leaving out some details and happenings - some that were widely known and others that were "secrets". That being said, Hem(as he is affectionately called - seeing as he loathes Ernest) nonetheless emits a plethora of juicy details and tidbits that make A Moveable Feast a compelling and delightful novella - even if it is nonfiction.

Hemingway runs the entire gamut(a word F. Scott uses much to Hem's displeasure) with his eclectic cast of expatriates including the virtually blind James Joyce, the alcoholic genius hypochondriac that is F. Scott Fitzgerald, the influential & eccentric Gertrude Stein, the elitist Ford Maddox Ford, the bel esprit of Ezra Pound, the selfish, insane, and terribly jealous Zelda Fitzgerald, a fellow who he profanely derides named Hal whom I suspect is Henry Miller and many, many more. By the way, we learn that La Generation Perdue inadvertently was coined by a garage mechanic of Gertrude Stein, not Gertrude herself. An indescribable feeling of vibrancy, vigor, and passion emanate from A Moveable Feast as Hemingway, despite being poor, inherently loves his life, writing, sipping his cafe de cremes and white wines in Paris cafes, as well as his continuously changing circle of friends. I highly recommend this short, yet unforgettable work, to all who want to learn what it truly was like when Hemingway was poor and unestablished living check to check - and nonetheless exerting an invigorating joie de vivre. Paris in the 20's - a time and place magically unlike any other in history.

"It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." - Hemingway.

This posthumously published short book is a memoir of Ernest Hemingway's Paris years in the mid 1920's. It is written as a series of brief vignettes with real names. Hemingway looks back, writing in the late 1950's in Cuba to the days in Paris when he was poor, young and happy. Hemingway describes coming to Paris from America in the early 1920's and meeting some of the literary expatriates of the Left Bank. He describes his friendship with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford. He recalls a rainy road trip taken across France with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He joins Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company lending library and takes vacations to Italy, Austria and Spain. He works as a journalist for the Toronto Star while writing short stories and seeking to make a name for himself as a writer. He describes his discovery of and passion for bullfighting. He publishes collections of short stories and begins work on his first real novel.

Hemingway's Paris days are spent sitting in cafes. He takes the act of writing seriously and sets out rules to keep his mind clear and prevent writer's block. He takes delight in discovering Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore selling English language books. He has plenty of time to go sightseeing with his first wife Hadley during those years in Paris when they were "poor and happy."

There is palpable sense of the older Hemingway looking back nostalgically on the good old days. He speaks frankly of his old friends, pulling no punches even to the point of portraying them quite unflatteringly. Most interesting of all is his ritualized approach to writing. He writes only in the morning, usually alone in a small room he has rented just for that purpose. He forces himself to stop while his story is still unfolding in his mind so that he will have something to write about the next day. He makes a point of reading books, visiting museums and especially observing Parisians going about their daily business. These things he incorporates into his writing.

This is not a novel in the traditional sense, nor is it a rigidly chronologically ordered memoir. The starting and ending points of the vignettes are not specifically defined. I would recommend that anyone who reads this follow up by reading Michael Reynolds's "Hemingway, The Paris Years." The timeframe of the two books almost perfectly coincides and Reynolds's book will give you a perspective on the things Hemingway leaves unsaid.

The final chapter in which Hemingway places the blame for the break-up of his first marriage to Hadley on his second wife Pauline Pfeifer, while not taking any responsibility for his unfaithfulness, is almost bizarre to read. Since this book was published after his death, it is surprising to me that his children by Pauline did not wish to see it suppressed. Pauline is portrayed as a husband stealing, back stabber single mindedly luring an unwilling Hemingway away from his loving gullible wife and young child.

A MOVEABLE FEAST is many things to many people. First of all it is, as my title suggests, Papa Hemingway, near the end of his life, reminiscing about himself at the beginning of his writing career. Next, it is a commentary on a group of young American expatriates who came to be known as "the lost generation." Finally, though perhaps unintentionally, it is a physical guide for those of us who would like to explore the Paris of the 1920's.

I have no way of knowing whether or not the young Hemingway was ever as naive as he is painted by the older Hemingway. In scene after scene, Hemingway takes the most outlandish utterances at face value. As an example refer to his luncheon conversation with Ford Madux Ford. I won't ruin your fun by giving you the details. Along these same questionable lines, he describes his first wife, Hadley, as being a rather mild creature who follows his lead in everything without ever expressing a contrary opinion or desire. Fact, or tricks of an older man's memory? Who knows?

Regarding "the lost generation," we are treated to an anecdote wherein Gertrude Stein's mechanic first coins the phrase. We are also introduced to the likes of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company book store and publisher of Joyce's "Ulysses," and, of course, Gertrude Stein and her companion who remains nameless in this book. In the early years, Hemingway liked Stein and Hadley detested her nameless companion whose function was to "talk to the wives."

Now to my favorite part; A MOVEABLE FEAST as a guide to Paris as it was, and mostly, still is. On my last trip to Paris, I carried a copy of A MOVEABLE FEAST with me, and, with it, spent a couple of enjoyable afternoons on the trail of Hemingway, Stein, Pound, et al.

Since the book opens with the Hemingways living on the Rue Mouffetard, it was the beginning of my "lost generation tour of discovery." Rue Mouffetard is still there, not too far from the Latin Quarter and the River Seine. It isn't much changed from Hemingway's day with the possible exception of a modern underground bowling alley. One still sees meat display cases featuring pig snouts and ears, and skinned rabbits.

Many of the rest of the locations mentioned in the book are in Montparnasse within just a few minutes of each other, and again on the left bank, only a few minutes walk from the Seine. I started with Hemingway's apartment. The sawmill beneath it is gone, but the building still stands there. A few hundred yards up the street, Ezra Pound's house still stands. We were able to locate Gertrude Stein's apartment from the address given in the book, and sat in her courtyard waiting for Hemingway, Joyce, and perhaps Picasso to drop by.

Again, only a few hundred yards from Hemingway's apartment, we visited the Closerie des Lilas, Hemingway's "home cafe," where he could be found many mornings doing his writing. The only change is in the prices. These are only a few of Hemingway's haunts that can be located by using A MOVEABLE FEAST as your guide book.

In summary, for me, A MOVEABLE FEAST is a mini guide to my favorite city and a mini history of my favorite era in that city.