Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964)

I notice something different with each re-read. This time it was his clean style and love of the wild. ( )

Those who have not seen the elephant and lack the courage to go looking for it have no right to criticize Ernest Hemingway, who set out as a young man to find the elephant and get a good long look at the Beast, and then describe it for the rest of us. As a young man he did not yet realize that few people are as brave and as honest as he.

He went. He saw. He wrote. He told us all about it -- and scarcely anyone believes him. Those who don't tell the few who do that Papa was a fool and a bad man. So it is in life as it was in "The Old Man and the Sea." Now that the big fish is dead, the little ones come to gnaw on his corpse.

Nobody with anything to lose has a friend in this world. The person who has nothing may find one. Papa knew.

'A Moveable Feast' is for stargazers everywhere. If you're one of those who dotes on famous people and if, in particular, you dote on members of 'The Lost Generation,' this is the book for you because it shows you what your heroes look like in their underwear.

Fans of Ernest will love 'A Moveable Feast.' Fans of Scott and Zelda may hate it. Fans of Gertrude will - - - - Well there's no telling how they'll feel about it, which was always a problem, even for poor old Gert. The only character in the whole set who gets away clean is the lady owns the bookstore and binds up busted heads. Highly recommended. ( )

See my note at Moveable memories ( )

It is a very intriguing prospect, to dive inside the mind of an author I admire, if only for the span of a novel, and therefore I thoroughly enjoyed Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Hemingway’s style was revolutionary in its time—straightforward, precise, and virtually without unique diction or extra description. And yet, for a man who wrote seemingly so little, he conveyed more ideas and established more themes in A Farewell to Arms than I expected when I read it last year, and this memoir that I read this summer was a deeper look at how he accomplished this.
The fact that the setting of most of the memoir is Paris, in which he inhabited in the 1920’s with so many other American authors of his time (the “Lost Generation”, as they were called because they had become disenchanted by American society and therefore had chosen to move), gives the work so much charm just in the first few chapters. It is also interesting to see, through Hemingway’s eyes, some of his peers, especially F. Scott Fitzgerald, as I also enjoyed The Great Gatsby in American Literature last year. Interestingly enough, Hemingway is not impressed with Fitzgerald, and his reason for that gained him some more respect from me. While he saw Fitzgerald writing solely for money, he prided himself on how much he enjoyed the process of writing. He made rules for himself of when he could write, he devised ways of saving his mind between writing sessions so no ideas would be lost, and quite frankly, though he was very poor during this time period, this memoir is written with contentment.
Hemingway is the epitome of never letting success get in the way of passion, and because of that, I have added more of his novels to my reading list. I believe that when an author truly loves to write, it shows in his or her work. My favorite part of this novel, however, was when, rather bluntly (as is his way), Hemingway admits why he uses such straightforward diction. He writes what he knows to be a correct statement, and then expands from there. How simple a layout, but I guess this is why his words hit home with me so often. Yes, he creates plotlines that are open to interpretation based on the reader but underneath all of that, there is a foundation of truth.
So, in this memoir that I picked up at my local used bookstore and only read out of slight curiosity, I found the inner thoughts of an author so original and revolutionary, and yet so content with himself and the way that he wrote, that it inspires me to further devise my own writing style. It won’t be like Hemingway’s, but I hope that when I have a clear idea of it, I will be just as happy picking up a pen as he was. ( )