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

”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 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 ar...

Paris is a celebration, a hymn to life, friendship, creation, and a magnificent tribute to Paris.Woody Allen's last film, "Midnight in Paris", led me to re-read this excellent author, who is Ernest Hemingway. Here it is a minor work, but it reveals all the talent of its author.Here he evokes his first stay in Paris in the 1920s, in the company of his first wife, Hadley.That's a financially difficult stay, poor in income but oh so rich in joie de vivre, discoveries, and friendship.We travel throu...

If you haven't been to Paris, you just won't get A Moveable Feast... If you aren't already a fan of Hemingway, don't bother reading A Moveable Feast Look, I'm struggling to get a start on this review and those were the first two statements that popped into my head. I don't know if they are true. I don't know if they are fair. What I do know is this work - fiction, memoir, sketches, a polished diary - whichever of these it may be - wouldn't exist without Paris. Obviously, right? No, that's not wh...

Loved it!Like Hemingway, I love Paris from the bottom of my heart. And like him, I was lucky enough to spend some time there as a 22-year-old university student. I remember the feeling when I got off the train, knowing I had months of P-A-R-I-S ahead, and how precious each minute felt. I remember walking the streets, stopping to gaze into shop windows, to have coffee, or to browse bookstores. And I remember reading all those wonderful authors who had made Paris their home, feeling connected to t...

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...

How have I not read this before?? Absolute perfection from beginning to end. Budding artists will eagerly highlight the numerous sentences on craft and style. Literature lovers will moan when Hemingway casually describes hanging out with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and a long list of other giants who happened to all be writing in Paris at the same time. If you're both a writer and a reader, this book is a must for sure. The scenes are deliciously candid. In one

'We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaplyand 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 m...

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-recr...

“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.” “We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.” I love Ernest Hemingway as a writer, at his best, especially in many of the stories, but in the main novels, too, there is often breathtakingly good writing. Then there are the books, some of them much later, where...

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway presents vivid and interesting observations on his days struggling to make it in post WWI Paris. Interacting with other writers described by Gertrude Stein as being members of the lost generation, A Moveable Feast shows a young Hemingway defining himself as a different kind of writer. The connections to The Sun Also Rises are readily apparent. However, Hemingway’s thoughts about art and his writing are relevant to all his novels and short stories. This is an...

To paraphrase ol' Hem, "This is a fine and true book. It is honest and good, and the stories are important and just."Hem, as I shall forever call him now, wrote this memoir just a few years before he died in 1961. It's about Hem and his first wife, Hadley, when they were young and poor in Paris in the '20s, and Hem would borrow books from the famous Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, and he would go to cafes to write. While there are stories about other writers in Paris at the time -- such as F. Scott...

"We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other."A memoir of Hemingway's time spent as a young, unknown writer in 1920s Paris.This is very sensory based writing. References abound to food and drink and the change of seasons in Paris. You can feel what it's like to be living in poverty as a practically starving artist. And yet there are other ways to be fed. Intellectually and emotionally.Hem talks of the many books he devoured, of viewing...

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...

Memoir… or fiction? It doesn’t matter with this amusing classic, a series of poignant and light vignettes about the author’s time as a poor, struggling writer in 1920s Paris.Hem (as people refer to him in the book) offers up clear, unfussy portraits of everyone from salon-mistress/tastemaker Gertrude Stein and Shakespeare & Co’s generous owner, Sylvia Beach, to a snobbish, forgetful Ford Madox Ford and a nasty Wyndham Lewis, whom he compares to “toe-jam.”I especially liked the couple of chapters...

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, po...

Ernest Hemingway. A big name in the literary game. I was always hesitant to read him. Mainly due to his book titles, they never really grabbed me, feeling masculine and daunting. I thought he was a author I would struggle to connect with. How wrong I was. This retrospective memoir of his early writing life in Paris as an expatriate set in the 20’s was a great place to start, getting a good sense of Ernest as a young man before his fame as a well loved author. There’s so much beauty and wonder in...

Yes, I know, this is a high rating. But I did really enjoy reading this book. It was like I was with Hemingway in Paris in the twenties. It really came to live before my eyes. I think it has much to to with his manner of writing. Very clear sentences, not a word to much but it captures all he has to say without much frivolity. He wrote this book at the end of his life so he really mastered this very own style of writing and which I like so much.

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 breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.Well, this book was amazing. I was rather trepidatious, but it turned out to be excellent.People who interfered with your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted su...

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, especial...