Mi primer Hemingway! Realmente me ha gustado conocer su prosa, oír su voz a través de las palabras; paladear sus silencios. Ver Paris con otros ojos. Y beber...porque beber, hemos bebido todos. Hemingway por haberlo escrito, su retrato por haber alzado la copa y todo el elenco de figurines que lo acompañan, por no dejarlo sólo.

این کتاب دومین کتابی بود که از ارنست همینگوی خوندم. کتاب اول، «وداع با اسلحه» روایت آدم های بی تفاوت و سرد روزهای جنگ، و این کتاب به نوعی خاطره نویسی از سال های ۱۹۲۱ تا ۱۹۲۶ زندگی همینگوی در پاریس. فضا و‌ لحن رو دوست داشتم. کاملا میشد اون روزهای پاریس رو زندگی کرد و با تجربه های نویسنده شریک شد. اشاره های جالبی هم به زندگی و زوال اسکات فیتزجرالد نویسنده کتاب «گتسبی بزرگ» میشه که البته در درستی و بی غرض بودن اون شک و تردید وجود داره.
اگر مثل من پاریس اون سالها رو عاشقانه دوست دارید حتما این کتاب رو بخونید.

Charming, ranging, generous, memoir of Paris, stuffed full of memorable lines ("Never Any End to Paris") and packed with the luminaries of the expat era. How weird to read a book where Joyce is just sort of around, where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas squabble, and where, in an excellent moment, Fitzgerald's face turns into a death mask while drunk. All along, Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley is at once extolled and mourned. I read the Restored Edition, which in some ways I regret, especially after reading about the interventionist edit and suffering through repetitions, but this is an infectious breeze, one that will infect you with wanderlust. Hemingway is an odd caricature of himself, but there is a charm to his wanton masculinity that makes him hard not to like.

Credit to the writer who when you close the page makes you wonder to yourself: perhaps I should drink more during the day.

*I remind myself that this book was published posthumously. Who knows to what extent EH would have moderated it. It’s not fair to judge him by it.*

EH has a large influence on my own writing. I like this book. But the more I learn of EH, the more complicated becomes the picture. EH’s talent doesn’t give his arrogance a free pass, and in A Moveable Feast I find his snide comments of those closest to him detestable. If the expats were hanging in the Paris cafes I’d be heading to Greece.

AMF offers a glimpse into the impassioned literary life of young EH, however true to reality it is. If Ken Burns’ PBS Documentary on EH is accurate—the constant lying, the poor treatment towards those closest to him, the infidelities—not a whole lot remains of Hem’s character. And for an autobiographical book, he doesn’t paint a picture of a good man. I’m not blaming him: we are to every extent a product of our environment. His was at times quite dark: his mother, what he both lost and took away from service in multiple wars, having suffered multiple concussions.

His prose in many passages to my ears is very beautiful. He’s a literary artist who creates vivid scenes with few words and minimal use of adjectives, that’s well known. He writes clearly and cleanly and engagingly, and he makes doing so appear deceptively simple. For his cut-and-dry style there is attention to detail and a real sensuousness—rare talent. In the mind of this reader a picture is created of a man sensitive to his world, however insensitive he often was to the feelings of others.

Still, his snipes include his own self, and towards some he’s not without moments of kindness and compassion. “Ezra was a great poet and a gentle and generous man…” EH’s concern for the working class preserves some of his character and complicates his virtue. How touching is his relationship with the bookshop owner Sylvia Beach. She lends him books on credit, as he claims multiple times that he was very poor then (a claim contested by historians). Twenty years later EH rolls in to Paris, somehow commanding his own brigade when he was not a soldier (incredible), to the exclaims of his old bookstore friend Sylvia Beach, “Liberate us Hemingway!” That almost chokes me up. “Can’t you do something about the German snipers on the roof, Hemingway?” They do. He is larger than life.

In many places this is a very funny book and I haven’t read funnier EH. Lots of witty sarcasm and subtle humour. Drugged Ezra Pound throwing dairy at Hemingway: “For a poet, Ezra threw a very accurate milk bottle.”

Said to an aspiring writer who was annoying Hem at work in a public restaurant, “Listen, a bitch like you has many places to go. Why do you have to come here and louse a decent café?” I mean, that’s pretty hilarious. EH would predate modern rap.

I always like hearing great writers evaluate other writers:

At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians. Chekhov had the clarity of water. Dostoyesvky could somehow change you as you read him — how can Dostoyevsky write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and yet make you feel so deeply? — frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoy.

We slept close together in the big bed under the feather quilt with the window open and the stars close and very bright. In the morning after breakfast we all loaded to go up the road and started the climb in the dark with the stars close and very bright, carrying our skis on our shoulders.

I know from working with editors that writing like that takes risks, even if it doesn’t look like it. That little repetition would be struck-through by many editors. It’s a subtle risk for style. I love it. It’s why EH once said, “I wanted not to be limited by the literary theories of others, to write in my own way, and perhaps, to fail.” Man, yes.

Even if the truth of his writings are questionable, the romance he inspires of the craft, as well his infectious zest for life, in this reader, in this writer, is undeniable. A constant admirer.
***
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Ils fête dans Paris, par exemple: jauger du pénis (une obsession du Américains), un Ford avec mauvaise échappement, and the "mama of dada" (Gertrude Stein)

Published posthumously in 1964 (3 years after Papa died), this somewhat scattered memoir covers his years as a young writer living in Paris. You may already know the title comes from a passage in the book, "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."

For most of the memoir, Hemingway was married to his 1st wife, Hadley: “When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her." Of course, this would be terribly touching if not made just prior to leaving her for wife #2.

A Moveable Feast provides wonderful tips for neophyte writers and a fascinating look at those heady days in Paris, with (sometimes overly nasty) parts covering a friendly Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, a charismatic James Joyce, Gertrude Stein (Hemingway described as resembling a "Roman soldier"), Ford Madox Ford (apparently awfully foul-smelling) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose wife Zelda apparently made him remarkably self-conscious about the caliber of his reproductive equipment). As to the latter, Papa discussed the subject at such *length* I wonder if the homophobia he showed elsewhere in the book could have been self-hatred (protesting too much).

As Christopher Hitchens so aptly explained the continued American fascination with this memoir, it's "an ur-text of," or "skeleton key to" "the American enthrallment" or "literary fascination with Paris...." And it serves the nostalgia of Hemingway "at the end of his distraught days, as he saw again the 'City of Light' with his remaining life still ahead of him rather than so far behind."

I am not finished yet, but I love this book. I am googling many names as I read this (Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Walsh, Gertrude Stein). Honestly, I never would have picked this up if I hadn't read The Paris Wife, and I think this book is a wonderful companion to it. I also like the order in which I read them: The Paris Wife first and this one second.

This book is a memoir, with the vignettes written by Hemingway himself. Here is a favorite part I just read (Bumby is his and Hadley's child): "There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big, wonderful cat named F. Puss. There were people who said it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignornant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby's breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat's weight would smother him. F. Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage bed and watchd the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out....there was no need for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter." I'm not suggesting that I'd leave my baby with a cat, but I still found this quite great!

Review Continued: Special thanks to Kathleen of Novel Ideas who nudged me to read this book, and this edition in particular - the Restored Edition - which must be the version you read because it is the "more comprehensive version of the original manuscript material the author intended as a memoir of his young, formative years as a writer in Paris". And a very personal memoir as well, especially because Hemingway has written this in the first person.

What came across loud and clear to me was Hemingway's love for his first (of 4) wife, Hadely. Although the breakup was his fault (and he takes full blame) I believe she was the love of his life, and this book was like a tribute to her in my opinion. As he writes on page 219 "I accepted all the blame for it myself and lived with the remorse. The remorse was never away day or night until my wife had maried a much finer many than I ever was or ever could be and I knew that she was happy." And the one line that I will never forget "I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her."

Memoirs of the young Mr. Ernest Hemingway in Paris during the early 1920s, the so-called Lost Generation because they were annihilated from history, what a change to our humanity....forever their promise will never be lived. A sad testament to our strange world... Endlessly gone...in a pit. Gertrude Stein popularized this term, quite accurate. The author Ernest was a veteran of the mad conflict even wounded and saved in an Italian hospital, the book "A Farewell to Arms " very autobiographical his second novel.



Since millions perished in the vicious recent war of attrition, no glory but plenty of blood, a vast deep ocean ...
The unknown writer seeks fame, praise and probably most importantly money... it's no fun being poor and what 's a better place than this illustrious city of artists, to join the parade. Newly married a wife eight years his senior still beautiful, Hadley a charming lady... the first of four and later wrote his favorite. He struggles however, the fun part is the many giants Hemingway meets, the minors poets, writers and painters the winds of time floats them towards unknown regions. Brutally honest sometimes, Gertrude Stein, her weird manners revealed, the hopeless pathetic drunk F.Scott Fitzgerald and his jealous glamorous wife Zelda, going insane, James Joyce almost blind and likes to drink a little, arrogant Picasso , always kind Ezra Pound before he choose the wrong side in the next war . Sylvia Beach owner of the renowned book store Shakespeare and Company... invariably helps the writers good or bad. By far the most interesting character is F.(Francis) Scott Fitzgerald his constant drunkenness , pitiful talk and gloomy moods. Telling Hemingway he has a reputation of being cruel , heartless and conceited not something Ernest hadn't heard before (I bet) , The Sun Also Rises makes him rich and famous. Having visited Spain with his wife and friends watching bullfighting in the ring as thousands look on , fascinated him. The excruciating contest reminiscent of ancient Rome to others, excited the author 's soul. Wrote his first novel from that experience at 27. For the curious lovers of literature an essential read and drinks for all the readers, you don't want to feel like an outsider...join the wild party while sitting on your couch.

Reading A Moveable Feast was a strange combination of pure pleasure and pure torture for me. On one hand, what could be better than reading a pseudo-memoir written by the unabashedly self-absorbed, and yet enduringly charming, Hemingway--all white wine, manliness, and burgeoning craft, with an excess of anecdotes and remembrances (often unflattering and unfair, god bless him) of his eccentric and luminous contemporaries? Not much. Especially with such memories: of Gertrude "Aldous Huxley writes like a dead man" Stein, of Wyndham "Eyes of an Unsuccessful Rapist" Lewis, of confirming for Scott Fitzgerald that his endowment was of a sufficient dimension to please any decent woman (compared, when it was, with statues at the Louve).

Everything is romantic: unheated Parisian cafes, living on money borrowed from the woman who owns the bookstore/library, having dinner with fire eaters, skiing up into the tip-top of the Alps to learn about avalanches in the winter, losing 6 months' savings on the ponies, boxing with Ezra Pound, donating money to fund T.S. Elliot's departure from his humdrum bank job. Eating and drinking. Not eating and drinking.

But especially, 'Working.' That up-with-the-sun-to-work-on-my-craft self-imposed grindstone that one sweats over as one might laying bricks and mortar all day. For from the way Hemingway describes it, writing--working--is hard, physical (manly) labor. It taxes you and it costs you and it takes a whole morning to get a paragraph written, but all the better! Like a good climb up a tall mountain, your exhaustion only proves that you've done something real and worthwhile. Which is a sentiment that can make any writer-in-training feel grand and important. This isn't art or creativity or any pansy self-expression. This. Is. Work.

And yet...

Hemingway tells us of a time when one could travel through Europe on a seasonal basis, drink bottles of wine by the liter, eat out in cafes all the time, and still be considered poor. When you could make a living selling magazine stories and the odd piece of journalism. When these combined payments were not only enough to fund an apartment for you and your wife and son, but also for a nursemaid, and for a separate hotel room in which you could work (naked, if need be).

It's a particularly classy brand of poverty that doesn't sound impoverished at all.

Alas and alack. But it's still fun to read about.

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

This is Hemingway's memoir during the years he spent in Paris with his wife as an expat in the 1920s.

There are so many sorts of hunger… memory is hunger.

What made the reading of this remarkable book more enjoyable is Hemingway's reminiscences of known authors such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and few others.

One does not forget people because they are dead.

عالي بود،بخصوص بخش مربوط به رابطه اش با فيتز جرالد

Though often containing gorgeous prose, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has a clear agenda. The book treats Hemingway’s life in Paris from 1921 to 1926. Although the book clearly is autobiographical, in the Preface, Hemingway, after explaining that several items were left out of his memoir, then suggests, rather coyly, that “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction” and adds, “But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” In essence, Hemingway wants it both ways: the book may be regarded as either fact or fiction. Although there is no reason for readers to read the work as fiction, Hemingway’s suggestion serves two ends. First, Hemingway introduces the idea that the book could be viewed as a novel, an idea that echoes the famous challenge he issued when he wrote The Green Hills of Africa where he ponders whether a work of nonfiction, if written truly enough, could compete with a work of the imagination. Aligning the work with fiction promotes its artistry; in addition, Hemingway’s Preface serves to justify his carefully reconstructed version of his early life.

However, Hemingway’s book does not seem like fiction because of what he leaves out, but rather for what he puts in. And, what Hemingway adds is gossip. Rather than the often vain, self-centered, and troubled person that Hemingway was, he presents a smoothed over, patient, loyal, and often loving version of himself. His first wife, Hadley, whom Hemingway unceremoniously dumped for Pauline Pfeiffer, is promoted to near sainthood. Ford Madox Ford is presented as hygienically challenged and a fool, Ezra Pound is a saint, and Ernest Walsh is a posturing liar. Yet, Hemingway presents his gossip artfully, even reluctantly. At one point, in reference to rumors about a writing award in which Ernest Walsh was involved, Hemingway disassociates himself from gossip and even attempts to admonish the reader: “If the news [about the writing award:] was passed around by gossip or rumor, or if it was a matter of personal confidence, cannot be said. Let us hope and believe always that it was completely honorable in every way” (125).

Despite Hemingway’s stated qualms about avoiding gossip and upholding honor, he shows no restraint in his portraits of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Stein is introduced early in the memoir, and then destroyed completely in a later chapter entitled, “A Strange Enough Ending.” Tellingly, Hemingway begins the chapter by observing, “There is not much future in men being friends with great women…and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers” (117). Significantly, Hemingway diminishes Stein’s writing ability by relegating her to a general group of “ambitious women writers.” Hemingway recounts visiting Stein’s house; as he waits for her, he overhears an intimate conversation. Hemingway writes, “…I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever.

Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy” (118). Hemingway takes pains to describe how he quietly exits and asks the maidservant to say she had met him in the courtyard, and that he had never entered the house. Nevertheless, Hemingway’s willingness to write the incident and include a private conversation belies the gentlemanly behavior he tries to portray. The intimate conversation Hemingway provides—word-for-word—is designed to make Stein look foolish and weak. Hemingway uses gossip to assert his superiority.

Despite the many pages devoted to Gertrude Stein, Hemingway’s portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald serves as the book’s dramatic core. By the time Hemingway meets Fitzgerald, he has already published This Side of Paradise and had just completed The Great Gatsby. In contrast, Hemingway has not yet been able to write a novel and worries whether he can. When he reads The Great Gatsby, its genius stuns him. Hemingway’s artful vignette of Fitzgerald serves to cut him down to size. Throughout the book, Hemingway carefully constructs his writing persona and implies that the attributes he displays—discipline, diligence, and attention to craft—are the qualities of a true writer. In contrast, Hemingway introduces his portrait of Fitzgerald by implicitly comparing talent with craft.

Like Fitzgerald’s physique and character, which Hemingway dissects piece-by-piece, Fitzgerald’s writing ability is portrayed as weak and suspect. Fitzgerald, Hemingway implies, has not earned his ability to write; even worse, Fitzgerald only recognizes his talent after it is gone: “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 had been effortless.” Hemingway implies that Fitzgerald’s writing was not an intellectual, crafted ability, but more a matter of luck. Fitzgerald was given a portion of talent, but he had not worked for it, and it contrasts with the sturdy and true writing that emerges from craft.

Not content with rendering Fitzgerald’s writing ability suspect, Hemingway continues to dissect Fitzgerald, taking direct aim at his manhood. Like a good gossip, Hemingway provides salacious details. However, Hemingway packages his gossip carefully. Hemingway writes, artfully: “Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have the mouth of a beauty…The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.”

In the following chapter, “A Matter of Measurements,” Hemingway assuages the insecurity Fitzgerald feels because of a comment Zelda has made by taking Fitzgerald into the men’s room, inspecting him, and pronouncing the size of his penis normal. The content could hardly be more intimate and sensational. Hemingway performs verbal surgery throughout A Moveable Feast, and despite the book’s artistry, Hemingway spares almost no one his scathing memoir.

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I'd mentally filed Hemingway into the "Crusty Old Authors I Do Not Like" drawer after being bored to tears by THE SUN ALSO RISES and THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA in my youth, and did not touch the drawer again until my mom said, "Hey, you know what you should read? Hemingway's memoirs of 1920s Paris where he hangs out with F. Scott Fitzgerald and all these other famous people." And I thought, hmm, okay, might as well give it the old college try, if only for the inevitable poetic descriptions of the Seine and good wine.



A MOVEABLE FEAST honestly feels like it's been written by a totally different writer. There's a straightforward wistfulness to the writing that imbues the prose with a misty luminescence-- like a streetlamp in the fog. Hemingway writes about the literati hanging around Paris, turning it into their own snooty little writer's club. I had no idea that Gertrude Stein was such a snob, and the way he describes her describing her colleagues-- like a general recounting battles in which he has defeated other generals-- was just so colorful and striking. I found it fascinating how quickly he seemed to grasp the measure of people and cut right to the heart of who they are.



The food and wine descriptions are lovely, and I think people who have been to Paris and know firsthand how expensive it is now will be awed at how Hemingway and his wife were able to get by on so little. This is, first and foremost, a measure of an author struggling to balance his life of the fine arts with an ill-paying job that often leaves him hungry and poor. It's a bit romanticized, but there are unexpected brutal moments, too, such as him choosing to go for walks in the park during lunch hour in places that were far away from food so he wouldn't have to suffer.



The two high points of this book for me were the utter dysfunctionality of the relationship between Zelda and Scott F. Fitzgerald, and learning that apparently Hemingway saw nothing wrong with leaving his favorite cat to babysit his child in the cradle. But I honestly loved the way this was written and while there were some repetitive parts, most of it left me feeling nostalgic for a time I never even lived through because the emotions in his writing were just so strong. I'd never really considered Hemingway a likable guy before but this book really makes him a compelling figure on paper. Color me impressed.



4 to 4.5 stars