A Moveable Feast (edition 1996)

Dedicating a chapter to discuss (at length) F Scott Fitzgerald's small penis must be the biggest dick move in literary history. I wonder in what way he must have had annoyed Hemingway to warrant this. Alternatively Hemingway must've become really petty at the end of his life. ( )

I think I am not a big fan of the way Ernest Hemingway writes, but I do truly enjoy what he writes in this book. Fantastic stories about his time in Paris and about all those artists he meets there. Really highly recommend it. ( )

A memoir of Hemingway's time in Paris in the early 1920s, "A Moveable Feast" seemed right up my alley: I like Hemingway and I like France. However, the book didn't offer as much of either as I'd hoped. Hemingway spends most of his time listing the places he got drunk, patting himself on the back for being a writer, and name-dropping every famous person he ever knew. The chapters are a rundown of petty grudges mined 30 years later, each writer or artist described with a maximum of spite. Hemingway has no problem airing everyone else's dirty laundry (overheard fights between Gertrude Stein and her partner, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's marital problems, stating that one acquaintance had the "eyes of a failed rapist" despite this person's not factoring into the narrative at all), but reveals nothing about himself. He refers to his own infidelity and let's-say-poor-manners with such oblique language that it's hard to even tell what he thinks went on, and describes his first marriage like a fairy tale. I didn't believe it for a second. The book was enjoyable in its specific references to people and places in Paris, but all I learned from it was that Hemingway despised most people and couldn't let anything go, no matter how trivial. For a man so concerned with writing things that are "true," he couldn't bring himself to be vulnerable and honest when it counted. ( )

I love this book. Spring rain always makes me want to reread it. Fall rain, too. Something about changes in weather makes me think of damp, crowded Paris. Oh, to be able to time travel! ( )

Hemingway wrote this short collection of vignettes during the very last years of his life. And because of that, they are the mature reflections of a great writer looking back at the beginning of his career as a young, married man living in Paris in the 1920s. What interests most people today are Hemingway’s memories of other authors he knew (and he knew them all), but in particular F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though Hemingway greatly admired Fitzgerald’s books, especially The Great Gatsby, his stories about the man and his insecurities are cringe-worthy. And though written many years later, he doesn’t have a bad word to say about Ezra Pound, despite the latter’s later support for Mussolini and Hitler. (Hemingway’s own anti-fascist credentials are, of course, rock-solid.). The book is also important for its description of how Hemingway wrote, especially his now famous injunction to writers to leave the last sentence of the day for the next day, so he would have somewhere to start and not a blank page. As Hemingway explained, every young person should spend some time in Paris — this one did — and his or her experience there, like this book, will stay with them their entire life. ( )