A Moveable Feast
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Author: Ernest Hemingway
- Publisher: Scribner
- Release Date: October 1996
- ISBN-10: 0684833638
- ISBN-13: 9780684833637
- List Price: $24.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryIn 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 |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Hemingway at his best with humor
Rating:
Anyone interested in learning how to write needs to read The Movable Feast. It's all about Hemingway and a couple of pages of Hemingway with F. Scott Fitzgerald. How funny. I never knew Hemingway to be this charming or delightful. This is an important book in the Hemingway collection and a must to read. I am very happy that amazon.com carried this book and books like this. Think of the years that have past.
This edition is the real McCoy...
Rating:
I have been avoiding reading Hemingway for years, after reading the classic novels in my college years. But I love the Hemingway of A Moveable Feast. Of course he idealizes this time in his life, writing after he had lost Hadley and in many ways lost his own true path in life, palling around with the rich and famous. His self-discipline and his way of mixing writing and living in his younger days set an example worth following; he also wisely chose to quit betting on the horses to bring in money for the next meal. The ordinary people of Paris are his most wonderful memories. Maybe this is a bit of a shtick, but who cares, I guess it's my shtick too. One remembers Evan Shipman's habit going gardening with the waiter at the Closerie de Lilas - sometimes just because they both liked gardening but once to cheer him up about having to shave off his military mustache from World War I in order to keep his job at the Lilas. Of course one also remembers the famous parts about Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Hemingway's genuine liking and disliking of them. All these people had strong personalities and it would've taken a saint to love them all. Hemingway, unlike Ezra Pound, was no saint, and he enjoyed skewering pretentiousness even when it came wrapped in talent.
The Paris of the twenties and Tatie's daily life there with Hadley, Mr. Bumby, and F. Puss come to vivid life. The ending, obliquely reporting the beginning of his affair with Pauline which ultimately led Hadley to divorce him, is written with a deep self-reproach which makes his eventual choice of suicide emotionally comprehensible. This final chapter is the main part that is omitted from the publisher's "restored" edition, revised by Pauline's grandson Sean (who has an axe to grind). Evidently a new chapter has been added, placing Hemingway's love for Pauline in a stronger position. Read that one from the library if you're curious, but buy the original before it goes out of print!
Hotchner's Vital Op-Ed in July 2009 NYT
Rating:
A. E. Hotchner and Ernest Hemingway were very good friends for 14 years. On July 19, 2009, Hotchner had an Op-Ed published in the New York Times about the new mutilated "restored" version of A Movable Feast. The Op-Ed is a quick and powerful MUST read. Hotchner makes crystal clear that A Movable Feast was very definitely intended for publication and that Hemingway provided his publisher, Scribner, with the completed manuscript before he became hospitalized.
If you are interested in the book, be certain to read the original with all it's beauty and acid, not Hemingway's grandson's cleansed reworking, which never should have been permitted.
Took me by surprise
Rating:
I was in Key West earlier this year, and one of the things I made sure to do between cocktails and conch salads was visit Hemingway's house. It's an incredible place, maybe the perfect writing space, and I want it.
Anyway, I hadn't read Hemingway in years, so while there, I picked this up. Released posthumously, it's a loose memoir about his years in Paris at the beginning of his career. He includes a lot of thoughts on writing, and on the people he knew there -- Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford -- as well as some picture perfect descriptions of the city.
What really surprised me, though, was how funny it was, how many wry observations and underplayed comic asides there were. I knew Hemingway was a master of rhythm, and when it comes to making you feel a bullfight or a battle with a tarpon, there ain't nobody better. But I hadn't remembered him as funny.
Ragged but Entertaining Read
Rating: 
It is very obvious that Hemingway was ill when he wrote this book. He mixes fantasy with reality quite liberally and he himself, in the introduction, freely acknowledges this, recommending that this supposed 'memoir' of life in Paris in the 20's be regarded, for the most part, as a work of fiction. What is most likely is that at this point in his life, suffering from depression, failing health and undergoing shock treatments, he found it increasingly difficult distinguishing what actually happened as opposed to what, in keeping with his writer's sense, he imagined happening.
Stylistically, this book is also poorly written, with long cumbersome sentences and descriptions frequently marring the narrative. In addition, Hemingway's train of thought is sometimes confusing and many of his observations and the conclusions he draws from them remain hard to decipher. This book is not really even a literary work in any real sense but more in the tradition of another one of Hemingway's newspaper accounts albeit with literary pretensions.
The book also abounds in falsifications. Contrary to claims by the the author, there is no record of him ever taking a room in a hotel that was specifically reserved for writing; the same hotel, he claims, where 'Verlaine died'. In addition, it is common knowledge that Scott Fitzgerald did, in fact, give Hemingway considerable help with the first draft and subsequent revisions of his first novel The Sun Also Rises, something Hemingway categorically denies. He also leaves out the fact that whatever income he earned from writing was supplemented by his wife Hadley's trust fund, making the Hemingways not as poor as he would want readers to believe. There is also no proof of his claim that Scott Fitzgerald cynically admitted to deliberately spoiling short story submissions in order to make them saleable to the slick, mass-circulation magazines.
Judging by Hemingway's own words, his friendship with Fitzgerald was a peculiar one. Zelda Fitzgerald, though not a reliable source, even claimed the two had a homosexual relationship. Hemingway, himself, in the book, describes an incident when both he and Fitzgerald, after lunch and a few drinks, went into a washroom to inspect and determine the size of Fitzgerald's penis. Also, he describes a night in a hotel spent with Fitzgerald with Fitzgerald obviously faking a sick spell possibly, one might suspect, as a way of getting Hemingway to 'doctor' him - feel his forehead, open his pyjamas and put his hand on his chest, hold his wrist and take his pulse.....This and Hemingway's repeated references to Fitzgerald's 'perfect' features, his 'beautiful' nose and a mouth that, on a woman, could easily be considered 'the mouth of a beauty' and one is left with the impression that some sort of homoerotic attraction did exist between the two of them. Whether this was ever consummated, as Zelda Fitzgerald claims, is not known.
If one can excuse the garbled thoughts, the run-on sentences, the sometimes excruciatingly minute details of what streets he walked on, where he turned, how many blocks he walked, where he went for coffee, what he ate etc., the book can be a fairly entertaining read.
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