If you are debating if you should read this book or not there are things you should know:

-Read the restored edition of A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. Chapters were rearranged in the original version. The restored edition will give you a better feel for what Hemingway intended. The book was published posthumously. It is his last writing before his suicide in 1961. This edition has a great introduction by the author's grandson. You should read it first.

-Don't read this book until you are well acquainted with Hemingway's life. There is much you will quite simply not understand without a thorough knowledge of his life. The more you know before reading the book, the more you will enjoy it.

-This book contains previously unpublished material. Fragments showing different wordings of the same text are included. These fragments show you the essential message Hemingway was striving for. They add a lot to the book...that is if you are trying to understand who Hemingway was before his death. His misgivings and what he would have perhaps liked to change and what he was proud of. Good memories and bad. I think this book gives you a feel for his opinion of himself.

-This book is an autobiography, but covers only his early years in Paris, the 1920s. It is about his love for Hadley, his first wife and the true love of his life, and a few of his close friends, particularly F. Scott Fitzgerald. Much is missing - trips and people and many landmark events. An autobiography can never be totally balanced; it is of course his own view of himself, but I think if you want to understand the man this is a must read, along with other biographies and his writing. You must read other books too; you will flounder without them.

Some people do not like the strength, the simplicity and the honesty of his writing. I do. I don't think you can be convinced to like it if you don't. It is that simple. I agree that what is not said can strengthen a book. What is removed is not gone. The underlying message is made stronger.

There is such humor in this book. Humor - what pleases one will not please another. My gosh, Fitzgerald is worrying that he can never achieve good sex since his penis is too little. His dear wife Zelda told him that! Well, they go out of the room and look at his prick. "Stop worrying. Forget it!" he says to his friend. "It is absolutely normal!" Then he takes him off to the Louvre to show him. He explains and advises, gives a mini course in techniques. I saw a side of Hemingway which I have never seen before - kindness and true friendship. He is not always an egotistical bastard. Artists, and good authors are artists, are imaginative, creative and very hard to live with, but if they don't believe in themselves who will?

The narration of the audiobook by John Bedford Lloyd is more good than bad. The humorous lines, well they shine. The French pronunciation isn’t a winner but it doesn’t matter since Hemingway tells the story and you don’t need good pronunciation from him. He wouldn’t speak good French.

No, the book isn't perfect. Parts drag. Parts are quite simply not finished. I still enjoyed this book very, very much. Part of my pleasure is quite simply because I like how Hemingway expresses himself. Part is because I learned more about the man Hemingway.

شاید برای شما هم پیش آمده باشد که بعد از خواندن اثری از خود بپرسید چرا این ؟
و این دقیقا همان پرسشی بود که من در انتها از خودم پرسیدم : اصلا چرا و چه شد که این کتاب رو خریدم؟؟ که من شدم صید و او صیاد !؟ و یادم آمد که بله ، عنوان خیال انگیزش، نام بزرگ نویسنده اش و یکی دو جمله زیبا از متنش که این سو و آن سو خوانده بودم ، بی اختیار مرا صیدی کرد که خود، مشتاقانه سوی صیاد می شتابد...اما ظاهرا هیچ کدام کافی نبود

کتاب، شرح خاطرات همینگوی جوان قبل از " همینگوی" شدنش در پاریس سالهای ابتدایی دهه بیست میلادی ست، خاطراتی که میتوانست تا ابد ادامه داشته باشد، دیدارهایش با برخی از نامداران آن دوره مثل فیتزجرالد، شرط بندی روی اسب ها، کافه گردی های بی پایان، جستارهایی از کتابفروشی شکسپیر و شرکا، نوشیدن فراوان و ...که اگرچه ضرباهنگش سریع بود ولی واقعا بعضی قسمت ها تکراری و خسته کننده می شد و بی هیچ جذبه خاصی پیش می رفت
امان از بوی الکلی که مدام از کتاب متصاعد می شد، آن قدر که همینگوی ازانواع شراب و شامپاین و عرقیاتش، گفت و گفت و گفت که بی اغراق گاهی حس می کردم اطرافم، دستهایم، برگ های کتاب و ... اشباع شده از الکل
به نظرم مشهودترین خوبی کتاب، ترجمه سلیس و روان فرهاد غبرایی بود و دیگر اینکه نویسنده خیلی، راحت و بی تکلف و حتی بی ملاحظه روزگارش را در پاریس شرح داده بود ولی راستش جذابیتی برای من نداشت
در واقع این کتاب برای من نه مثل دوستی که یادش سالهای سال همنشین خاطراتمان هست بلکه شبیه ده ها رهگذری بود که در طی روز ممکن هست ازکنارشان عبور می کنیم و عمر همراهی مان هم تنها کسری از لحظه است و بعد هم تمام، همین

امتیاز واقعی تر هم 2.5
:)

عالییی، وقتی سفرهای پیاپی و ماجراجویی های بی پایانش همراه با ذهن خیال انگیزش معجونی می شود دلنشین که هر عاشق سفر و طبیعتی را به هیجان وا می دارد.
کتاب بیشتر از این که درباره پاریس باشد، درباره آدم هاست درباره سفر و در آخر درباره عشق به زندگی است.
تمام کتاب سرشار از زندگی است و همین باعث می شه که بخش اسکات فیتزجرالد که در واقع سفر همینگوی با فیتزجرالد به لیون هست با تمام بدبختی هایی که درش بود یکی از خنده دار ترین و جذاب ترین بخش های کتاب باشه.
بخشی از کتاب که دوستش داشتم:
"دختری به کافه آمد و تنها پشت میزی نزدیک پنجره نشست. بسیار زیبا بود و چهره ای داشت به تازگی سکه ی تازه ضرب شده- البیته هرگز سکه ای با نسوج صاف و پوست باران خورده ضرب نشده است. موهایش، به سیاهی پر زاغ، صاف و اریب روی گونه هایش ریخته بود.
نگاهش کردم و از آنچه دیدم آشفته شدم و به هیجان آمدم. آرزو کردم که او را هم در داستان یا هر جای دیگری جا بدهم، اما او خود چنان روی صندلی اش جا گرفته بود که بتواند خیابان و در ورودی را زیر نظر داشته باشد. فهمیدم منتظر کسی است، بنابراین نوشتنم را از سر گرفتم
دیدمت، ای زیبارو، و دیگر از آن منی – حال چشم به راه هر که خواهی گو باش و چه باک که دیگر هرگز نبینمت. تو از آن منی و سرتاسر پاریس از آن من است و من از آن این دفتر و قلمم."

The Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is an intriguing read.

It’s an odd little novel, more biography than fiction. Hemingway recollects his youth, the days where he had no money and lived from story to story before he had his first major novelistic breakthrough.

The reader that will take most from this will be one that has read a lot of 20th century literature and is aware of the interactions between writers and the ways in which they supported each other through their careers. Ezra Pound was a central figure who helped form a community of writers and organised donations for T.S Eliot so he could quite his job and write poetry. James Joyce was also important though quite hard to actually talk to (and even find.) Hemingway recollects the conversations he had with such men, and how they helped him hone his craft.

More importantly though, Gertrude Stein, writer and homosexuality advocate, was perhaps the one who influenced him most strongly. From reading this, it is clear that she was one of the truest friends Hemmingway ever had. I found the sections with her far more compelling than those with the other literary figures, and I would gladly have read a novel just about their curious friendship. There were some good bits here, though the novel took a repetitive tone as each new section only introduced a new writer and the novel as a whole didn’t feel like it was progressing.

The strength of the writing is at its peak when Hemingway describes Paris (where he met Stein.) He creates a vivid picture of a city that he clearly adored, one that shaped him as an individual.

Although I had my reservations about this work, I know I must try more of his novels in the future. This may have been a bad place to start (quite a few readers suggest that this is the last novel of his one should read) because it is a retrospective piece about how he became a writer. He is looking back from a place of sucess.

A Moveable Feast deals with Ernest Hemingway sharing an account of the years he spent in France in the 20's and especially in Paris.


A TEMPLATE FOR 'THE SUN ALSO RISES' :

In many ways, this book is the canvas for The Sun Also Rises. In the end, you get to sort out the characters in Hemingway's roman à clef The Sun Also Rises, for instance Lady Brett has a tinge of Zelda about her, while Harold Sternes has definitely some likeness to Cohn, that is, the same looks and demeanour of an unsufferable bore as Cohn is given in TSAR.


The big strengths are how apt Hemingway is when reenacts his years in Paris, staging conversations and giving out a cluster of places and restaurants and books and wine vintages, and racing tracks, and bicycle races, and boxing contests and skiing and living the bohème life on a narrow budget.

Yet, throughout, Hemingway comes out as quite self-important while being quite petty about other writers, without even allowing himself to appear so in earnest. Additionally, he systematically berates Gertrude Stein and FSF on the sly, while praising them in tepid terms to say the least.

'Scott was very articulate and told a story well. He did not have to spell the words nor attempt to punctuate and you did not have the feeling of reading an illiterate that his letters gave you before they have been corrected. I knew him for two years before he could spell my name ; but then it was a long name to spell and perhaps it became harder to spell all the time, and I give him great credit for spelling it corrrectly finally. He learned to spell many more important things and he tried to think straight about many more.'
(p.148)

I am not used being judgemental in my reviews but so is Hemingway, wallowing in the volleying of biting, bitter words against his fellow writers.

And he comes out of it by stating this is but fiction. Fortunately, there are some momentary lapses of sympathy in this hail of criticisms (e.g. when it is about The Great Gatsby).


IN PRAISE OF TERSENESS :

Finally, the book itself seems like a silent eulogy of writers of few words :

'I have tried to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged, by the man who writes it, by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.' (p.234)

What comes out essentially is a book about conversation, writing, good cheer and feasts with friendships wearing out. And despite the economy of words, a good deal of the throes FSF endures and that goes for Hemingway's entourage too.


THE GUESTS :

Sylvia Beach, Ernest Walsh, Rudyard Kipling, Anton Chekhov, Nicolai Gogol, Guy de Maupassant, Joyce, Turgeniev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Simenon, Apollinaire, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Cendrars, Trollope, Fielding, John Donne, Aleister Crowley, Karen Von Blixen, Sir Samuel Baker, Stephen Crane, Stendhal, Dunning, Robert Desnos, Joan Miro et al.

I started this book calling him Ernest Hemingway. Midway, my friends pointed out that I was referring to him as Hem. By the end, I knew never to refer to him as Ernest. More please...more nonfiction/memoir from Hem, if only it existed (some say there's more that was never published??...)

This book was an intimate portrait of Hemingway. I was never a big fan of his fiction: though his simple, deliberate, sentence structuring still leave me in awe, I've never really been a fan of the flow of his stories. But even Hemingway admitted struggling with novels--he was the short story guy who was trying to piece it all together. He wrote "The Sun Also Rises," in six weeks, then spent months trying to put it into novel format. F Scott Fitzgerald wanted to help him edit but he refused because he wasn't thrilled about letting anyone other than his editors read it during the draft stage.

Speaking of Fitzgerald--what great insight you get about Scott and Zelda. Zelda was a case, let's just say that. You also get to read about Ezra Pound, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ronald Firbank, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Walsh, and more. What about the females? I had to remind myself that it was the 1920s. Though you do see him interact with Gertrude Stein (though she's not portrayed in a good way), you hear a mention of Katherine Mansfield (not in a good way either), quick mention of Karen Blixen (who he thought wrote the best book he had read about Africa) and Hadley (his wife) and the loving thoughts he had of her as he foreshadows their demise--making it clear that it was all his fault.

"But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."

I felt as if I was breathing the same air as I read what he wrote, you could see the vulnerability, see his descriptions clearly, walk through Paris with him--cheers to young, up-and-coming writers in Paris (as if those days he describes still exist). He was poor, writing during the day, socializing and drinking at night (yay, writer stereotype) struggling with his writing, and upset whenever anyone talked about it to his face or told him he was a good writer. Pay that no mind though, because he makes it clear that he knows he didn't have the best attitude, he had a temper and somewhat of an obnoxious outlook.

I enjoyed the personal rants, the writer who quit journalism to focus on his dream of writing fiction, but every now and then, he realizes how poor he is, and goes off on himself: "I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly. I should have bought a large piece of bread and eaten it instead of skipping a meal. I could taste the brown lovely crust. But it is dry in your mouth without something to drink...You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord."

There were lessons littered throughout this book for writers. If you were to say Hemingway was imparting one in particular, it would be this perhaps, what he told himself when he couldn't start a story: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

”If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Ernest Hemingway

n  n
The Lost Generation: Hemingway and the circle of ex-pat friends he later immortalised in The Sun Also Rises. More friends, including Harold Loeb, the model for Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, on the left, Hemingway in the centre and Hadley on the right.


I hadn’t planned to read this book until I read this great article in the The Atlantic that was published recently by Joe Fassler that consists of a conversation he had with Daniel Woodrell. This article which whether you care one wit about Woodrell or for that matter Ernest Hemingway is still an inspiring read. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainm... Woodrell while bumming around Mexico found himself negotiating a trade with a hungry young American of a meal for a copy of A Moveable Feast. Woodrell ended up buying two tacos for a book that changed his life. He was ni-ni-nin-teen. He read the book through several times and for the price of two tacos it set him on the course to being a writer.

I have not read Hemingway for decades. I often think of him as a gateway drug to better literature. As you can imagine ever since my son was old enough to read I’ve been chucking books at him that I felt that he should read with frankly disappointing results. Books stabbed with bristling bookmarks littered his room and were left for dead. I realized I was trying to move him forward too fast and so I thought about what I liked to read when I was first becoming a reader. I tossed Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Rice Burroughs into his room. The books came back gnawed and masticated.

I did a little dance.

Then I gave him Hemingway.

I heard the snap of the bear trap.

He read everything he could get his hands on by Hemingway. In fact he has now read more Hemingway than I have. He then went on to Fitzgerald and expanded out to reading some film history books. By the whisker of my chiny chin chin he became a reader.

Despite the ease in reading Hemingway’s sparse prose I found myself squirming every time I sat down to read this book. I like vocabulary and the Oxford English Dictionary has listings for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words. So when we write we have a choice of 228,132 words to express ourselves. It feels like Hemingway cuts out 227,000 of them. The average literate adult knows 50,000, but may only use 17,000 and some studies show as low as 5,000. If you count for instance DRIVE, DRIVER AND DRIVES as three separate words our language blossoms to over 600,000 entries.

Hemingway was bucking against the establishment when he decided that adjectives were not necessary and sliced his prose down to just the bare minimum of what the reader needs.

Short sentences, short words.

I don’t mind some purple in my prose. William Faulkner’s famous epic opening sentence for Absalom! Absalom! was 1,288 words long. James Joyce in Ulysses made a mockery out of that with a sentence 4,391 words long. The fact of the matter is Hemingway has been canonized and his minimized writing style had a huge impact on the next generations of writers. I cringe whenever I hear anyone say if there is a simpler word use it. This all said a writer does have a responsibility to write to their audience.

n  n
The One and Only Gertrude Stein

Hemingway had some...well... interesting conversations with Gertrude Stein. Stein for the record gives me the willies more so when she expresses her opinions. The Lost Generation, as this group of creative people in Paris were called, flocked to her door and fell at her feet. She commanded respect and if you did not give that respect you were not invited back.

”I had started this conversation and thought it had become a little dangerous. There were almost never paused and there were something she wanted to tell me and I filled my glass.
‘You know nothing about any of this really, Hemingway,’ She said. ‘You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy.’
‘I see.’
‘In women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together.’
‘I see.’”

I see. I see. I see.

Hemingway also spent some time with Fitzgerald. His portrayal of F. Scott is not the most endearing, but then I have no illusions about Fitzgerald and his destructive lifestyle, in particular, his debilitating drinking. Hemingway did admire Scott’s writing.

”His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a Butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it was effortless.”

n  n
Ernest Hemingway (The Bull) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Butterfly).

Hemingway becomes exasperated with the devastating influence that Zelda had on Fitzgerald’s life and writing. She wanted to drink, party, and be merry all the time. Zelda Sayre broke up with F. Scott after they became engaged. He was determined to become famous in an effort to win her back. He wrote This Side of Paradise and sent it out for consideration to publishers. The result: he lined the walls of his study with the rejection slips. After a third revision Maxwell Perkins went to bat for him and Scribners decided to publish. The book sold out in three days.

It makes me wonder if F. Scott had never met Zelda would he have ever become a successful writer? She was his muse and his kryptonite.

One thing I have discovered over the years in watching the relationship gymnastics of my friends is that we can not help who we fall in love with. It is mystical and sometimes makes no sense even to ourselves.

n  n
I’ve always liked this picture of the The Fitzgeralds.

A source of contention between Zelda and F. Scott was that all those wonderful witty bits of dialogue that came out of her mouth ended up in his writing. She had literary aspirations herself and felt that he was stealing her best material.

I wish I’d read this book when I was ni-ni-nin-teen because maybe I’d be a brilliant regional writer like Daniel Woodrell. (It could have been me being knocked silly on an episode of No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain.) If you do not know much about the Lost Generation and their time in Paris this isn’t a bad place to start. It will be a quick read and should lead to other books and a new found interest in a period of time when it felt like everything was possible and change wasn’t something to be feared.

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there is nothing that i love more than knowing all the geographical references in a book so may hemingway be blessed for talking about Paris.

What to make of a book of reminiscences that are nothing if not autobiographical but which its author called a fictional work? Indeed, there are two versions of A Moveable Feast, both published after Hemingway's death and I initially read the so-called "Restored Edition" with a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, a version introduced & edited by Hemingway's grandson Sean.


This is however the version of A Moveable Feast called "A Moveable Book" by A.E. Hotchner, a close friend of Hemingway & someone who saw the original manuscript shortly prior to the author's suicide, attesting that the original edition was the one Ernest Hemingway had in mind to publish. Hotchner, sometimes said to be like "Hemingway's 4th son" authored several very interesting books dealing with the author, Papa Hemingway & also Hemingway in Love. For my part, I prefer the original 1964 edition of A Moveable Feast to the 1994 version.

In reading A Moveable Feast a rough compilation of fragments, it seemed that the book was a combination or a cross between an elegy to Paris in the 1920s and an epitaph of sorts, an attempt at recovery of some golden moments lived in Paris between the wars when Ernest Hemingway was attempting to forge an identity, still uncertain as to whether he would live his life as a journalist, a poet or an author of short stories and one day a novel.

The fragments include intersections with Sherwood Anderson, Ford Maddox Ford & of course with Gertrude Stein & Scott Fitzgerald during a period when Hemingway longed for money but seemed to despise those who possessed it. Part of the fiction is that Hemingway saw himself as a struggling Bohemian writer in Paris, while living in large measure on his 1st wife Hadley's trust fund. Thus, the couple is able to go off skiing in Switzerland for months at a time & to spend extended periods in Spain observing bullfights while E.H. plays the part of a starving artist.


28 years after Hemingway deposited some steamer trunks in the basement of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, forgetting they were there, he is able to retrieve them, finding notebooks that conveyed his life with Hadley in Paris, fragmentary notes he made at various cafes while observing life over coffee or wine or beer.

One day over lunch with Charles, the proprietor of the Ritz, E.H. is reminded of the steamer trunks while revisiting Paris and has them taken in tow with him on his homeward voyage. These recovered booklets form the background for what at times seems a lament for the author's vanished youth, a reclamation project for lost love and above all an attempt at apology to Hemingway's 1st & seemingly most beloved wife Hadley. For starters, many suspect that E.H. lacked the potential for any kind of apology or contrition. And yet he confides:

That winter was like a happy & innocent winter in childhood compared to the murderous summer that was to follow. Hadley & I had become too confident in each other & careless in our confidence & pride. In the mechanics of how this happened I have never tried to apportion the blame, except on my own part.

The bulldozing of 3 people's hearts to destroy one happiness & build another and the love & the good work & all that came out of it is part of this book. I wrote it & left it out. It is a complicated, valuable & instructive story. Any blame in that was mine to take & possess & understand. The only one, Hadley, who had no possible blame, ever, came out of it finally & married a much finer man than I ever was or could hope to be and is happy & deserves it and that was one good & lasting thing that came out of that year.

There is an analogy to breaking a leg skiing vs. breaking a heart but suggesting that "often we become stronger in the broken places afterwards." This is a common refrain with Hemingway & in the "Restored Edition", there are multiple renditions of this thought at the end of the book, seemingly with no one expression of this thought chosen, as opposed to the original version of the book.

One of my favorite passages is when E.H. details a particularly lovely dinner with his wife Hadley at a place called Michaud's and then walking back to their apartment, seemingly becoming hungry again after dinner at the exciting & expensive restaurant where James Joyce & his family had also been patrons...

Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt was just hunger. I asked my wife & she said "I don't know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are even more. But that's gone now. Memory is hunger." It was a wonderful meal at Michaud's & afterwards we went home & made love in the dark, it (the hunger) was there.

In the moonlight I could not sleep & lay awake thinking about it. Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened. Paris was a very old city & we were young & nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right & wrong, nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Another Hemingway theme deals with the craft of writing, or as he put it in this book: "Write the truest sentence that you know. All you have to do is write one true sentence & then go on from there." When young, feeling invulnerable & living in Paris in the 1920s, E.H. endeavored to write one true story about everything he knew, cutting "the scrollwork or ornament out & beginning with the first true simple declarative sentence" that he was able to conjure up.


There are interesting intersections with Ezra Pound, a kind of mentor for Hemingway and also with Sylvia Beach, someone who aided the author with books on loan & introduced him to James Joyce & others at her legendary bookstore, "Shakespeare & Company". The various fragments are loosely compiled, placed seemingly at random within A Moveable Feast & yet Hemingway struggled for an ending, finally suggesting:

There is no last chapter. There were fifty. I hope that some people will understand & forgive the fiction & why it was made that way. It has been cut ruthlessly & many things changed. There is no catalogue of omissions or subtractions.

The lesson that it teaches has been omitted. You may insert your own lesson & the tragedies, generosities, devotions & follies of those you knew, unscramble them as in an instrument of transmission & insert your own. You will be wrong, as of course I was. There is no formula to explain why this book is fiction nor will it be effective.

When the book appeared in print Ernest Hemingway was already gone from the scene but in an interesting manner, at least for me, A Moveable Feast does serve as a kind of catalogue of some of his first memories as well as his last thoughts, an unofficial epitaph if you will.

*The first photo image is of Hemingway & his first wife Hadley at a ski resort in Switzerland; the second is of Hemingway standing beside Sylvia Beech, owner of Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, 1944 & the 3rd of E.H. with Hadley & their son Jack.

Παρίσι + Hemingway Αναπόφευκτο 5*

I'm not going to lie - I think I first heard about this book in like 1999 after seeing City of Angels. I read it at the time at the campus library and thought it was fine, but then pretty much put it out of my mind. I've read a few other books by Hemingway since and I have to say that I am not that impressed. Believe it or not, I actually enjoyed that one book about the fish that everyone hates the most. But other than that, his writing doesn't work for me, nor do the topics about which he liked to write.

So while this was a re-read, I feel it was more like a first read since I have no memory of the original reading. I remember more about that stupid movie, City of Angels, than I did about this book.

This is a collection of somewhat interconnected autobiographical vignettes of Hemingway's life in the early Twenties in Paris. He romped around with big names like Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford, etc. And Hemingway noticed everything. And wrote about everything.

I appreciate the 'starving artist' aspect of this memoir. I really enjoy that kind of thing. There's a romance surrounding that persona, and there's a lot of romance surrounding the Lost Generation.

What I noticed this time that I don't think I picked up on originally is that it felt like these were the memories Hemingway wished that he had. There's something a bit to clean and polished about his reminiscences and his dialogue that make me think he wrote then in a way that was more what he wished he had said rather than what he might have actually said. Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical, but I didn't find a lot of his memories necessarily believable.

"We'd better get [Fitzgerald] to a first aid station," I said to Dunc Chaplin.
"No. He's all right."
"He looks like he is dying."
"No. That's the way it takes him."
We got him into a taxi and I was very worried but Dunc said he was all right and not to worry about him.

That last sentence alone, clumsy as it is, sounds to me like Hemingway trying to rewrite history. Maybe in reality they were all drunk and having a good time, and maybe Fitzgerald wanted to stop drinking, and maybe Hemingway pushed it... so then later he felt guilty and didn't want people to know about that, so he re-envisioned that memory.

Obviously there's no way for me to know that. That's just a feeling I got throughout based on a lot of the scenes and dialogue. But to be fair, you can't prove that I'm not right either, so yay team.

Ugh, and don't get me started on the last scene where he returns to his wife, Hadley, and expresses all the love inside. Romantic, yes, but believable? Nah.

I hadn't been to Paris the first time I read this book, and now that I have, I did enjoy the descriptions of Paris that Hemingway wrote. He could have made a more convincing travel memoir than... whatever kind of memoir this was. That being said, I don't believe it was even the best descriptions of Paris I've ever read - Victor Hugo did it better, as far as I'm concerned, for one.

But, yes, as some sort of insight to the Lost Generation, this is an important little text. Unfortunately it's one of the most popular Lost Generation books, so our knowledge of the motley crew comes from the hand of Hemingway, which then takes me back to the beginning - can we take all of it as the complete truth?

Welcome to my head, folks.

So, yeah, it was fine. I'm glad to re-read it. I was more excited as I started it, but as it continued I started having all these second thoughts and questioning what was said. Always questionable in memoirs and autobiographies, yes, but some are more convincing than others. This is most convincing, I think, to Hemingway himself.

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 Ezra Pound lend new depth to these writers' works. Hemingway played close to the vest his fling in Paris. He was close to Sylvia Beach, whom he admired and visited at her Shakespeare & Company: she 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.