Monday, June 9, 2008

Hemingway's Very Digestible A Moveable Feast

For a beautiful and quick summer read, MSC highly recommends Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Curiously billed as a work of fiction (it's really an autobiography loosely based on facts), it's Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the 1920s. And was Paris ever the place to be: Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Getrude Stein, et al. Wow! Written in the late 1950s prior to his entering the Mayo Clinic in 1960 and his subsequent suicide in 1961, this posthumous work proves that Hemingway still had it late in life. Anecdotal gems abound, from Hemingway's chats with Gertude Stein ("heavily built like a peasant woman") where "[i]f you brought up [James] Joyce twice, you would not be invited back," to the malodorous and annoying Ford Madox Ford, to the self-destructive relationship between the almost always boozing Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Hemingway's fascinating rules for writers can also be found here: "It was in that room . . . that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it . . ." Funny, whiny, serious, opinionated, and simple, A Moveable Feast goes down easily.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i agree, it's a beautiful book. will there ever be another time like it (paris 1920's) with all these amazing writers in one place?

Anonymous said...

the book shows how hemingway had a side to him that went against the macho stereotype.