A Moveable Feast

First read October 2011.
Second read February 2014.

Valuable reading for writers. I have to admit, I'm not a Hemingway fan (and by no means a Hemingway scholar), but I found his portraits of life in Paris interesting, and wistful. He only refers to his own approach to work in passing, but I would have appreciated a more in-depth explanation of his writing philosophy.

Also, the F. Scott stuff is bizarre.

One of my favorite parts was a passage that described being on a writing-roll by him narrating from inside the scene, and you don't realize what he's doing until his writing gets interrupted. At first it wasn't clear, but when I realized what he was doing I got excited. I reread the passage, then read it aloud to N, and only then did I get enough of it to continue with the chapter.

Most of his name-dropping was lost on me, save for the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein (whose name I recognize only because she was a friend of Hemingway's); because I didn't know them, his anecdotes and descriptions would fall a little flat. When he wrote about normal people, however, like his favorite waiter, they came to life. And naturally his descriptions of Paris itself were fantastic, written with true love and affection.

1999 Finally...I see...Hemingway....

2010 Hemingway's reflections on his time in Paris during the time after the first world war. He encounters and befriends Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach and Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Oddly, this book links rather well with Tender is the Night and Good Morning, Midnight, both of which were written during this time in France, and both of which I am also reading.

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.

Transports you to Paris as a struggling artist growing in success in the 1920's.

You can't ask for more than that.

First Hemingway I've read; I was very skeptical that I would enjoy his writing and I remain a facetious reader of his but there's something about him. I would have given this three stars just for the ridiculousness of “Secret Pleasures” but I found it in my heart to forgive him it.

—

“In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.”

Read book. Recommend for Shea maybe, depending on content due to her love for all things “Paris”, if that's still the case.
Recommended by Nathaniel Drew.

A book that will, I believe, connect with everybody who has always been moving or wanting to move but never moved. This book, like many other works by Hemingway, comes to you slow and terse and with the initial resistance. But it comes to you, it comes to you. It is like reading something while being in sync with the life of the book itself, in its most bare form.

His fiction is masculine in a way I can't really enjoy. This, however, has enough wine and food and sassy descriptions of author friends (and frenemies) to gloss over his less charming qualities. It's a brief 200 pages. There is a lot of a wine, a lot of rain, and more horse racing than is prudent.

I started reading this 9 years ago, couldn't finish, and then again a couple of years ago - it was the much earlier edition. Though I enjoyed it as I would any Hemingway book, I was not as drawn to it as I did in the third reading. Back then I had no connection to the places and the locales he often uses as points of reference to characters and the silent developments in his inner world. This would explain why I trudged through it. I did not get to finish the book when typhoon Rai destroyed my home and most of my books.

Fast forward to last winter when I visited Paris and bought the restored edition from the Shakespeare and Company. It was a laidback trip and had no company so I had the freedom to walk around mostly in the 5th arr. I didn't realize until later that this area was Hemingway's turf and I had meandered through most of the streets he wrote about. I did not read the book until after I left Paris.

With this new element my second time reading the book hit different, almost intimate, and I think it's because of the impression the city (along with my personal affections) had on me during and after. I finished the book in two sprints. 60% of it in one afternoon.


It was a good thing i got to reread this as the restored edition - the main text was how Hemingway had prepared it for publishing. The chapters are organized differently and some post-humous revisions rolled back. It also has additional sketches/chapters and “fragments” after the main text, that are alternate versions/drafts of some sections found from his manuscript. A bulk of the chapter on Hadley and Pauline which was previously omitted were very powerful in that the reader has access to the his most vulnerable state in that “winter of murder”. All of this provide a better understanding of the author's perspective and process, and a glimpse into the fragility of the mind of the great writer who by that time was already marked for death.