Customer Reviews

Walks In Hemingway's Paris: A Guide To Paris For The Literary Traveler

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Hemingway fans will adore this book, but for anyone interested in literary and artistic Paris, this exceptional guidebook will also lead you to the haunts of such luminaries as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, e. e. cummings, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Author Fitch includes a helpful introduction to Paris, followed by an insightful introduction to Hemingway's Paris. Seven self-guided tours contain detailed commentaries for each stop along the route. The best of the itineraries take you along the Seine, through the Latin Quarter and around the Luxemburg gardens, which are the most pleasant places to walk in Paris anyway. Even though it's easy to get lost in the maze of short and angled streets of Paris, clear, good-sized maps throughout the book keep you oriented. Nearly fifty black-and-white photographs, many of them historic, evoke the ambience of Paris in the 1920s. Photos include Sylvia Beach in her Shakespeare and Company bookstore; Scott, Zelda and Scottie Fitzgerald celebrating Christmas in their apartment on rue de Tilsitt; a wicked cartoon of James Joyce drawn by Fitzgerald in 1928; and, of course, Hemingway. A detailed index helps you find information about places and people.

After loosely following Tour Two through the Saint Germain neighborhood, my daughter Anne and I had morning coffee and pastries at the Cafe de Flore, Anne scribbling away in her journal. When I teasingly asked the waiter how Hemingway, and later the Existentialist writers who haunted the Cafe de Flore in the 40s and 50s, managed to get any writing done on the tiny, round tables barely large enough to hold a plate, he teased me back by pushing two of the tables together so I had plenty of room to pen my immortal postcards. But unless money is no object, it's too expensive to order much more than coffee at the famous Left Bank hangouts of Hemingway and his expatriate cohorts. On Rue de Buci and Rue de Abbaye in the Saint Germain neighborhood, close to Hemingway's Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots, you'll find less expensive, less pretentious cafes where you can order a great bowl of French onion soup.

After two important introductory chapters, the seven walks take the reader or tourist to every Hemingway (and Fitzgerald) site in Paris. These walks were tried/previewed by many classes of students at the American University of Paris. Although a few details date the book, it holds up today! The walks, by the way, include wonderful quotations from many of Hemingway's novels, short stories, and his memoir of Paris. Buy the book and come to Paris!!

I took this book to Paris and went to every single place mentioned. It was easy to use and fun to read and made me love Paris (and Hemingway) even more.