A Moveable Feast

I should have read this book before I read The Paris Wife last year, but in a way, reading that one first helped me understand this one a little bit better I think.

This is a beautiful book about Hemingway's life in 1920's Paris.  Right there are three of my favorite things ever:  Hemingway, Paris, and the 1920's.  I loved this book.  I do admit it took me a bit longer to read it because I kept getting distracted by new, exciting book recommendations from my Entertainment Weekly magazine, but finally I finished it today while sipping cafe au lait (almond lait by the way) outside on the back patio.  I could just imagine I was at an outdoor cafe on the Notre Dame des Champs with "Hem" and Scott (Fitzgerald) watching the Parisians go by and pining away about writing stories.

A Moveable Feast is the posthumously published memoir of Ernest Hemingway.  Although most of his books could be considered to be loosely based on his life, this is truly the autobiographical account of an important part of Hemingway's life.

I have to include some of my favorite passages from this book:

"Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night. (7)"

"All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know. (12)"


"But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. (58)"

"'I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky,' I said.  'How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?' (137)"

"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 loved anyone but her.  She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr. Bumby standing with her, blond and chunky with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy. (210)"

I almost cried when I read that last passage.  It was at the very end of the book when his marriage was about to fall apart because he was having an affair.  That was the part of The Paris Wife that made me cry too.  Hemingway was such a passionate writer and it shows in his work, but his life was so messed up!  That's how it always is with the brilliant artists isn't it?