A MOVEABLE FEAST

Rating:
Summary: Hemingway's Paris comes Alive
Review: Let me start off by saying if you dont' like Hemingway, and aren't interested in what many consider one of the most well known periods in Anglo-American literary history then you'll probably find this book a good read but not much else.

To me it is fascinating how so many young people in one place either were famous or were to be come literary and artisitic incons.

The book is a lose autubiography of Hemingway as a young writer trying to make it in Paris with a wife & child. There are lose sketches of what has now become something of a cliche- the bohemian writer hanging out among artists and writers in the cafes of Paris- but here we have the reason for the cliche. He records his meetings with Erza Pound, Fitzgerald, G. Stein, and a couple of lesser known figures.


What's often missed in popular portrayls is just how hard Hemginway worked, which is made clear in the book but not in an abtrusive way.

Rating:
Summary: From a Traveller's Perspective...
Review: From my perspective as a traveler about to visit Paris for the first time, I'm really glad I picked up this book. I haven't taken notes as to the specific locations of the cafes and other addresses as they're bound to have changed over time as even Hemmingway laments that his favorite haunts were changing in his time. I think what I'll take from the book is that in my rush to visit the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, I should also leave time to meet the characters that Hemmingway shows lurk around and are only truly revealed over a glass of eau-de-vie, brandy, whisky, beer, wine, etc. (For him it's a long list...) It was not his intent to have people make pilgrimages to the locations mentioned in his book, and the line in the preface admonishing the reader to treat the content of the book as fiction brought that home for me. The fame of some of the writers and artists that he describes adds some flavor, but I enjoyed it simply from the storytelling perspective. For others that enjoyed the relationship between the writer and his city portrayed in this work, I would strongly recommend Bloomsbury's The Writer and the City series which pairs known writers with a city that spawned them and returns them to examine this relationship similar to A Moveable Feast -- a term which could really be associated with anyone's relationship with a city.

Rating:
Summary: An American in Paris
Review: During the early days of Hemingway's career Paris was was the most prolific writer's colony on the planet. The cost of living was cheap, the wine and food were good, and Paris attracted the talents of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford among others. Paris was truly a moveable feast in his day and, although Hemingway was poor at age 25, he was devoted to a career in which his primary objective was to capture a true sentence and then to follow it with another. This simple objective gives Hemingway's writing its power, simplicity, accessibility, integrity, honesty, relevance and broad appeal. Hemingway may have been poor but he lived well and from his Paris base ventured to Spain for trout fishing, Austria for skiing and the Riviera before it became fashionable. Hem's highly personal anecdotes about Scott and Zelda were exceedingly revealing. His insights on TS Eliot working at a bank and his boxing lessons with noble Ezra Pound lend new depth to these writers' works. Hemingway played close to the vest his fling in Paris and one wonders if it weren't with Sylvia Beach, whom he admired, lent him books and ultimately published Joyce's Ulysses. If you're a serious writer or aspire to become one, this little book of true sentences defines the sacrifices made by the genuises who crafted some of the finest novels ever written.