تصور کنید در چایخانه‌ای چند مرد سیبیل به سیبیل نشسته‌اند و در فضا فقط صدای قل‌قل قلیان و به هم خوردن استکان و نعلبکی میاد. در گوشه‌ای مردی نشسته و از خاطراتش میگه. شما هم گوش تیز میکنید تا صدای مرد رو بشنوید. هر از گاهی هم وسط صحبت‌ها حواستون پرت میشه به اینکه آیا قند رو بزنید تو چایی یا نه! ولی بعد از مدتی باز پی حرف‌ها رو میگیرید تا ببینید آخرش چی میخواد بگه. پاریس جشن بیکران برای من همچین حسی داشت. از اونجایی که کلا نوشته‌های همینگوی برای من اندکی ملال‌آوره و طرفدار داستان کوتاه یا خاطرات مقطع نیستم این کتاب هم من رو به وجد نیاورد اما کتاب بدی هم نبود و حسی که گرفتم شبیه به فضایی بود که توصیف کردم.ه

Interesting account of Hemingway’s time in Paris during the 1920s with his first wife and baby son. Hemingway writes about his memories of Paris in the 1920s with his first wife and baby son. His meeting and volatile friendships with several now famous people including Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

His memories were thought provoking with snide commentary about Scott and Stein. He also admitted he was grumpy and abrupt with friends. Not sure what to make of his memories and their accuracy. I might read the book again in the future.

I decided to bail after his visit to the indoor bicycle races, like dance marathons one of those frantic displays of recreational endurance so popular in the 1920s. A quick comparing look at Joseph Roth’s account of a night at Berlin’s tracked bicycle races, in What I Saw, convinced me that I was wasting my time with Hemingway. There are better books. Hemingway’s style will always strike me as more or less mannered and ridiculous, but what I read of A Moveable Feast was especially bad—solemn, pompous, dialed down to a portentous slow-mo. It’s enough to make one cite Nabokov’s opinion that Hemingway is essentially a writer for boys.

I'm heading for Paris on a work related trip in a few weeks so I thought I'd get in the mood by dipping into papa. BIG MISTAKE. I guess you had to be there. This is nothing but a bunch of mundane moments strung together by some boring name dropping and squalid hygiene habits.
I've never really been a fan of anything other than Ernie's shorter stories and now I remember why. He didn't write briefly for effect. He did it because he didn't really know enough words. It always sounds like he's peeking over his chubby shoulder looking for the camera ready to laud-scape his every thought.
A moveable feast is really nothing more than a moveable fat man looking for a meal and some hotties to hang on his precious words.
Paris prep is far better satisfied by listening to some Django, sipping on a crema coffee and pondering the reason cuff links are used on french-cuffed shirts.

Too bad that I didn't finish this in enough time to have it count towards my Literary Birthday book reads for 2016. I should have just DNFed it since it didn't do anything besides bore and annoy me in equal measure.

So this is a memoir by Ernest Hemingway, where he talks about writing and then shit talks everyone else. I think the only people that Hemingway could stand was his wife at the time and his son. And even then I have questions about that since he mentions how their cat used to Bumby (that was what he nicknamed his son I am guessing) sit and they would leave him alone to be cat-watched. I wish I was kidding here.

Hemingway seemed to be jealous and annoyed by all that came near him. He seems to have some weird falling out with Gertrude Stein and I don't know if it's because she was calling someone "pussy" in an affectionate tones, or maybe he disapproved of her being gay. He has some really weird asides about homosexuality in this book and apparently thinks that men were just looking to assault one another so you had to be on your guard against those type of people. I just don't know.

This book had no flow to it at all. It also read very sterile to me except it would come alive when he would be talking about his dislike of women, Zelda Fitzgerald and Stein.

"Under questioning I tried to tell Miss Stein that when you were a boy
and moved in the company of men, you had to be prepared to kill a man, know how to do it and really know that you would do it in order to not be interfered with."

"There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers."

Seriously though, most of this book seemed to be about his relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. There is jealousy here and there about how well he could write, and it seemed that Hemingway liked to show that Scott (as he called him) could not take his drink and was a bit of a hypochondriac. There is even an embarrassing scene where Scott tells him that his wife Zelda has said that he is not normal (length wise) and Hemingway tells him average is okay and let us go and look at some statues. I actually put the book aside for a second because I was hoping this was just a joke.

The memoir eventually peters out and we are provided early drafts of the beginning, and fragments of stories.

Cuando las lluvias frías persistían y mataban la primavera, era como si una persona joven muriera sin razón.

maestro di charme, hemingway visse intensamente nella parigi degli anni 20, restituendocela in queste fresche pagine quasi con candore. le foglie, l'autunno, le vie, gli incontri spettacolari, tutto sale come un magone ad avvolgerci e ci tormenta la sua malinconia.
la malinconia di fiesta mobile è patrimonio dell'Unesco. ammiriamola come si può ammirare la vetta di machu picchu, una piramide, la muraglia cinese...

It's official. I'm a gossip whore. Try as I might to deny it, I love hearing the dirt on other people. It should come as no surprise then that my favorite sections of this books were about Hemingway's relationships with Gertrude Stein and (especially) F. Scott Fitzgerald. Holy crap, who knew Hemingway was a gossip whore too? The man can really dish it out. I'm embarrassingly unfamiliar with the Stein christened "Lost Generation" though, so I don't know whether to take what he says with a grain or with a boulder of salt. All I know is it made for very compelling reading. It also made me want to reread The Great Gatsby (which I did not appreciate when I read it 15 years ago in high school) and other works by Fitzgerald, as well as more biographical works written about that generation of writers, poets, and artists.

I'm ashamed to say that the only other Hemingway I've read was The Old Man and the Sea. I'm now very eager to pick up some of his novels. I think A Farewell to Arms will be first, and it will be soon.

Whenever a friend/Roman/lover/countryman/debtor/student/
jackass bar brawler tells me that Hemingway lost it after THE SUN ALSO RISES or (being generous) A FAREWELL TO ARMS, I say: read this book. There are moments of vile approbation. It saddens me infinitely to hear EH bang on Gertrude and Scott, and some of the dialogue is transparently punchdrunk. But when I want to read a book by someone who lost his shit and knew he lost it spectularly, this be the one. There are few passages more self-recriminating in lit than the moment at the end of this one in which EH, lameting his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, says that he would rather have died than love anyone else than his first wife, Hadley. This is Hemingway kicking his own ass, and thus, a lesson to us all.

'We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply
and slept well and warm together and loved each other'

I don't quite know why it's taken me so long to get around to reading Hemingway, but that's two brilliant works now in a matter of weeks, after too many years of leaving him distant at the back of my mind. And if I'm honest, I never thought of him as a writer I would even like. How wrong was I. Hemingway wrote this when he was a successful older writer, about the experience of being a young man who was not yet successful, but who was happily writing away and dearly in love with his first wife Hadley. It's all very personal, but in the most generous and rewarding way, and when reading it I never felt like I was observing a person of self-indulgence.

As a posthumously published memoir (although it kind of reads like a novel) Hemingway describes the time he spent in Paris after the first world war, and the title - 'A Moveable Feast' feels most appropriate, as it's like moving around in circles during a banquet with a host of bohemian luminaries - Joyce, Pound, Madox Ford, and Scott Fitzgerald were all there living it up there (Fitzgerald features strongly in the book's last third). Not only does Hemingway depict himself surrounded by literary mentors and competitors, some he thinks highly of, some he doesn't, he is careful to record his gastronomic experiences. Food, visual art, alcohol (plenty of that) and racing provide the backbone of this unassuming memoir. Oh, and he was clearly a big fan of Ivan Turgenev, reading him often. His writing style here has exactly the same feel as his fiction: casual and affectionate, always engaging and easy to read, it's deceptive simplicity works a treat. There are lessons in his actual language, which is wonderful, and there are lessons also in the insight into his writer's brain, and the understanding of the fragility of the balance between being able to do it, and not being able to do it. He is writing about the joy of getting it right, with all the unspoken knowledge of the sadness of getting it wrong, both in writing and in life.

Hemingway's recollections are at times almost gossipy and he does spring up some surprising sentences, but you never feel too overwhelmed by the high concentration of egos gathered together, sometimes on the same page. We discover that Gertrude Stein was a frequent visitor to the young writer, that he did not get on so well with Ford Madox Ford, and that Ezra Pound always admired the work of his friends. The edition I read was punctuated with photographs, both of the manuscript and of the author and his contemporaries in Paris, including James Joyce and an alcohol infused F Scott Fitzgerald. And by the time we get to Zelda later on, it's quite clear that she also likes the odd drink. Actually when wasn't she drinking. Each chapter is short and vignette-like, comical, sometimes bitchy but always warming.

Although I loved the book as a whole, it's especially the last third when in the company of Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda (who could have been nearing a nervous breakdown) that really pushed me to give this the five star treatment. Considering By 1956 Hemingway was in a terrible state, both mentally and physically he was a wreck, but could still craft writing that is eternal. A Moveable Feast should be seen as the product of a man in terminal decline as much as the triumphant recollection of one beginning to realise his true powers. Except, it doesn't read like that at all. One of the most impressive things about A Moveable Feast is how sure he is, how hopeful it all seems, and how much fun it all is.

Even at the end, Hemingway could still do it.

Written near the end of his life, this is a collection of memories and impressions from Hemmingway’s years living in Paris in the early 1920s as an impoverished struggling writer and newly married father. The stripped down sentence structure for which Hemmingway is famous, tends to keep me at an arm’s length from the story. Despite the lack of engagement as a reader, I did come away with an impression of the literary expat community of Paris at that time.

The next time I go to the store, I'm buying a journal. Let's see, ummmm. "Today. I woke up. Dressed. Made breakfast. Exercised. Turned on TV. Watched it for three hours, then turned it down for background noise. Did laundry. Picked up iPad. Read ebook. Made lunch. Petted the neighbor's cat"

Hmmmm. My journal doesn't quite have the punch of Ernest Hemingway's daily record of his life in Paris, 'A Moveable Feast'. I think EH is safe from me poaching his audience.

'Chapter 2. Miss Stein instructs'. --that's Gertrude Stein, famous writer, talked with EH about how to write and about different books.
'Chapter 9. Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple'. --a cafe encounter where EH endures a conversation with this famous writer whom he dislikes.
'Chapter 11. Ezra Pound and the Measuring Worm' --Pound, the famous poet, wanted to learn to box. EH taught him a few lessons.
'Chapter 17. Scott Fitzgerald' --EH goes on a road trip with Fitzgerald.

EH is warm, outgoing and charismatic in these pages. He notices everything important and writes so lively, I forgot this has all passed into history. : ( He knows EVERYBODY who was famous in Paris. His walks often took him to salons, studios, cafes and homes which we only know by watching PBS, but his descriptions have the added bite of personal reflection and succinct observations.

Wow.