A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

I am leading a discussion of The Paris Wife written from the point of view of Hadley, Hemingway's wife during the 20's so I thought reading A Movable Feast would make the period and story more interesting. Both books are really good but A Movable Feast brings Paris alive with the sights, sounds and relationships that Hemingway had with his friends. There is little of Hadley in the book but with a few words you know how Hemingway felt about his first wife.

This flimsy memoir amounts to a shallow stream of anecdotes that don't amount to much. A certain nastiness permeates his characterizations of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a word: forgettable.

I read this in conjunction with "The Paris Wife." Hemingway's writing is a bit different in this one, but he is still Hemingway. Perhaps it was because this was written later in life, when he had the luxury of nostalgia to help his pen. You wish that he could have made it.

I had read Paris Wife and wanted to see what he had to say about that time of his life, living in Paris. It is interesting to know how little money they had and how they were able to live on her small amount of income per year. They were able to do a good amount of traveling and seemed to enjoy life with little money. I did not know he had done extensive journalism before becoming a published author. It was interesting, however I thought the writing was a bit lack luster.

When you are a Hemingway reader as I, you will see a " new" unpublished manuscript as a treasure. The best of these stories has everything: The Hemingway writing and mood, famous others as his natural friends, Paris way of livving anno 1925 a selfbiographical taint ...This edition is to much baked in with comments, the ordinary reader is not working on a Phd. As such the restoring seems very good, it looks like Hemingway an and tastes like him.

You must read Sean Hemingway's version of his grandfather's flawed memory of Paris in the 1920's. Ernest stretches his brain beyond its 60 year capacity to give us flawed but interesting short vignettes of several of the best writers of the twentieth century, who he lived alongside of during that period.

A wonderful read...I especially loved this book after reading The Paris Wife. Both books cover the same time period in Hemingway's life, and it was very interesting to read it from two different points of view. It was also interesting to compare the different writing styles.

I had just finished reading "The Paris Wife" about Hemingway's life with his first wife, Hadley, and was anxious to read "A Movable Feast" which reportedly was his take on their life during leaner times in their early marriage in Paris. I wound up feeling so sorry for Hadley because of the loneliness she must have endured while she waited for him to make his daily rounds of various Paris bars and other dives when he was supposed to be concentrating on his writing for their living. He appears to have been an extreme narcissist and a very selfish man (shades of my second husband), although Hadley obviously loved him deeply. His shoddy treatment and total lack of consideration of her during the "Pauline" period of their marriage was so familiar and painful to me that I almost stopped reading the book. Toward the end of the novel, however, he appeared to try to apologize to Hadley, apparently finally realizing the error of his ways and the fact that she had been his staunch supporter and true love despite everything that he put her through. I was happy to learn that after their divorce, she remarried and found the happiness and security that she so richly deserved.

This is a compilation of memoir writings by Hemingway put together by his family members after his death. There is no "plot," per se. It offers his frank opinions/observations of some of the well known names of his group of friends in Paris post-WWI (i.e. , the "Lost Generation.")

Love's lost. No matter what was done, or how. Who was met. 'Hem' had love and started his descent to losing it. The road is certainly paved with gold. The regret that much greater. Thank you, Papa for doing the work.

I have never read any of Hemingway's other books. This was my first experience. Overall, I felt the book was very good! I got very interested in his life in Paris. Need to read Hadley's story of the same time frame in, "The Paris Wife". Only real complaint, isn't really a complaint, is just a style preference really. I could not get past Hem's use of run-on sentences! By the time I finished reading the sentence, I had to go back and reread it.

Hemingway was a terrific writer, but in this autobiographical novel, there's a lot of arrogant posturing and a sense that he remembers the best of himself and the worst of others. And unfortunately, his exhortation to himself to "write something true" is largely a mantra which is ignored. Skip this book, and read his short stories.

The look into how Papa Hemingway wanted to approach his writing, 'the one true sentence' is as enjoyable as the romantic idea of writers in Paris in the 30's and 40's, their walks in the different quartiers, their meals, the horse racing (steeplechase), the arguments, the wine...all of it is truly a feast

Except for his shorter works set in northern Michigan and a few other short works, Hemingway was never much of a writer. He lacked depth, which is passable in short stories, but not in novels. While I'd rate Farewell a solid three or three and a half, MF is too many scraps thrown together, not pulled together by a passionate theme.

I had just finished reading "The Paris Wife" about Hemingway's life with his first wife, Hadley, and was anxious to read "A Movable Feast" which reportedly was his take on their life during leaner times in their early marriage in Paris. I wound up feeling so sorry for Hadley because of the loneliness she must have endured while she waited for him to make his daily rounds of various Paris bars and other dives when he was supposed to be concentrating on his writing for their living. He appears to have been an extreme narcissist and a very selfish man (shades of my second husband), although Hadley obviously loved him deeply. His shoddy treatment and total lack of consideration of her during the "Pauline" period of their marriage was so familiar and painful to me that I almost stopped reading the book. Toward the end of the novel, however, he appeared to try to apologize to Hadley, apparently finally realizing the error of his ways and the fact that she had been his staunch supporter and true love despite everything that he put her through. I was happy to learn that after their divorce, she remarried and found the happiness and security that she so richly deserved.

This is a compilation of memoir writings by Hemingway put together by his family members after his death. There is no "plot," per se. It offers his frank opinions/observations of some of the well known names of his group of friends in Paris post-WWI (i.e. , the "Lost Generation.")

Love's lost. No matter what was done, or how. Who was met. 'Hem' had love and started his descent to losing it. The road is certainly paved with gold. The regret that much greater. Thank you, Papa for doing the work.

I have never read any of Hemingway's other books. This was my first experience. Overall, I felt the book was very good! I got very interested in his life in Paris. Need to read Hadley's story of the same time frame in, "The Paris Wife". Only real complaint, isn't really a complaint, is just a style preference really. I could not get past Hem's use of run-on sentences! By the time I finished reading the sentence, I had to go back and reread it.

Hemingway was a terrific writer, but in this autobiographical novel, there's a lot of arrogant posturing and a sense that he remembers the best of himself and the worst of others. And unfortunately, his exhortation to himself to "write something true" is largely a mantra which is ignored. Skip this book, and read his short stories.

The look into how Papa Hemingway wanted to approach his writing, 'the one true sentence' is as enjoyable as the romantic idea of writers in Paris in the 30's and 40's, their walks in the different quartiers, their meals, the horse racing (steeplechase), the arguments, the wine...all of it is truly a feast

Except for his shorter works set in northern Michigan and a few other short works, Hemingway was never much of a writer. He lacked depth, which is passable in short stories, but not in novels. While I'd rate Farewell a solid three or three and a half, MF is too many scraps thrown together, not pulled together by a passionate theme.

Although I prefer his fiction, I enjoyed being reacquainted with Hemingway's style. His obvious tenderness for his first wife and love for his son was incredibly endearing, and his depiction of the Fitzgeralds fascinating!

If you like Hemingway and haven't read this, you should. If you don't like Hemingway, well, you know ahead of time you won't like this, or you've had to read it and you don't like it. Nobody's on the fence when it comes to Ernest Hemingway, and its easy to see why. I read this years ago, thought I'd give it another chance, to see if I'd like it now, but I didn't. This is a scathing put down of all of the people who helped Hemingway become the writer he thought he was, terrible snide comments about the friends he met in Paris - most of whom were dead at the time of publication of this book. It's no more than an Entertainment Tonight tell all in book form, and fancied up with a few decent sentences (very few), and fewer adjectives (darn few). It belongs in every Hemingway admirer's library; you'll not find it in mine, I donated it to the library. It's a cruel book; I've always been surprised that people found it so romantic and beautiful. It's nasty, just as H. was nasty.

I couldn't finish this book. I know we're also supposed to admire everything Hemingway wrote but the book felt unfinished, like it needed another edit or two. Sorry, Hemingway fans. The man wrote some terrific things but this one comes across as an early draft.

I was curious about Hemingway after seeting the new Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris. I found the book very interesting in conjunction with having seen the movie. I might read his first novel later which I believe is The Sun Also Rises.

Disappointing after reading Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company. He seems primarily interested in listing as many street names in Paris as possible. It started to come across like a variation on name dropping. It's sparse on insights into the literary scene in Paris in the 20s, unlike Beach's book. There's are, however, a couple interesting chapters about a car trip that Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald took revealing something about Fitzgerald's personality. This is by now means a must read on any level.

BORING! I didn't even finish the book because it was so boring. I had read The Paris Wife before this book and I enjoyed Hadley Hemmingway's take on the same time events. I was contemplating reading some of Ernest's other books but decided against it after this one.

I found this rambling and disjointed. I don't know if this was Ernest's fault or the fault of the person in charge of this restoration, who I think was a grandson named Patrick. Which wife did Patrick descend from? Hadley was hardly mentioned except as "wife". I was finally pleased to read in chapter 16 some compliments for her, some remorse on Ernest's part and some comfort he felt in realizing that she was married to a better man. Perhaps there was more for Hadley, but left out of this restoration. I also was interested to learn a little more about F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The arrogant little twerp retells his time in Paris. Without telling about all the emotional carnage he left behind. The book is written by an ego-driven second-rate writer who has somehow been lifted to great heights on the back of one novella: The Old Man and the Sea. The other books could be made into Lifetime movies. Pshaw.

I had just read 'The Paris Wife' and so this was a great companion read. As a frustrated writer myself, I relate to Hem, especially during his early years in Paris. I am convinced if I could spend 30 days in Paris visiting 30 cafes the spirit of Ernest Hemingway would be there to help me write something incredible.

If you like Hemingway and haven't read this, you should. If you don't like Hemingway, well, you know ahead of time you won't like this, or you've had to read it and you don't like it. Nobody's on the fence when it comes to Ernest Hemingway, and its easy to see why. I read this years ago, thought I'd give it another chance, to see if I'd like it now, but I didn't. This is a scathing put down of all of the people who helped Hemingway become the writer he thought he was, terrible snide comments about the friends he met in Paris - most of whom were dead at the time of publication of this book. It's no more than an Entertainment Tonight tell all in book form, and fancied up with a few decent sentences (very few), and fewer adjectives (darn few). It belongs in every Hemingway admirer's library; you'll not find it in mine, I donated it to the library. It's a cruel book; I've always been surprised that people found it so romantic and beautiful. It's nasty, just as H. was nasty.

I couldn't finish this book. I know we're also supposed to admire everything Hemingway wrote but the book felt unfinished, like it needed another edit or two. Sorry, Hemingway fans. The man wrote some terrific things but this one comes across as an early draft.

I was curious about Hemingway after seeting the new Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris. I found the book very interesting in conjunction with having seen the movie. I might read his first novel later which I believe is The Sun Also Rises.

Disappointing after reading Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company. He seems primarily interested in listing as many street names in Paris as possible. It started to come across like a variation on name dropping. It's sparse on insights into the literary scene in Paris in the 20s, unlike Beach's book. There's are, however, a couple interesting chapters about a car trip that Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald took revealing something about Fitzgerald's personality. This is by now means a must read on any level.

BORING! I didn't even finish the book because it was so boring. I had read The Paris Wife before this book and I enjoyed Hadley Hemmingway's take on the same time events. I was contemplating reading some of Ernest's other books but decided against it after this one.

I found this rambling and disjointed. I don't know if this was Ernest's fault or the fault of the person in charge of this restoration, who I think was a grandson named Patrick. Which wife did Patrick descend from? Hadley was hardly mentioned except as "wife". I was finally pleased to read in chapter 16 some compliments for her, some remorse on Ernest's part and some comfort he felt in realizing that she was married to a better man. Perhaps there was more for Hadley, but left out of this restoration. I also was interested to learn a little more about F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The arrogant little twerp retells his time in Paris. Without telling about all the emotional carnage he left behind. The book is written by an ego-driven second-rate writer who has somehow been lifted to great heights on the back of one novella: The Old Man and the Sea. The other books could be made into Lifetime movies. Pshaw.

I had just read 'The Paris Wife' and so this was a great companion read. As a frustrated writer myself, I relate to Hem, especially during his early years in Paris. I am convinced if I could spend 30 days in Paris visiting 30 cafes the spirit of Ernest Hemingway would be there to help me write something incredible.

A real sleeper. If you have trouble falling asleep, try this book! Unfortunately, this was the first book I've read by Hemingway. Judging by this book, I'm not sure I want to read any of his other books.

Easily the worst piece of media I have ever experienced. Nothing of any substance or worth happens in the entire story, it is horribly written, boring as all hell, the characters are ridiculously inconsistent (which should be impossible because this is an autobiography), and the characters come and go at will. Just truly awful.

The book shown is the 1965 paperback edition. I paid a premium price to get this edition. Instead, the seller delivered the 1996 edition. The content of these books are not the same. Hemingway's son edited the 1965 edition to produce the 1996 version. The 1996 version is less interesting; it also puts Hemingway's son's mother in a better light than in the 1965 version.

Book purchased along with The Paris Wife. I read A Moveable Feast on the beach in Mexico. As far as memoirs go... its always interesting to read about a perceived life, dated many years before. Not so very different from today except for places and time.

Delivery was prompt and I'm looking forward to finishing The Paris Wife.

I think this was one of the worst of Hemingway's books. He insults people who helped advance his career and many chapters deal with irrelevant stuff like cutting his hair. He acts like a snob and excuses his affair which ended his first marriage with a woman who loved him.

I am a Hemingway fan, but I put off reading A Moveable Feast until I was 39 year old and vacationing in Paris. I had been told by multiple people over the years that it wasn't a good book; rather, a collection of mostly-real stories about Hemingway's years in Paris during his early 20's.

Three things you should take when traveling in Paris: this book, a guidebook, and lots of money. (It's still a good book if you are not in Paris)

Hemingway was newly married and soon a father while living in the Latin Quarter. It's incredible to read about Hemingway's experiences and walk the very streets he wrote about. A number of the Cafes and Restaurants that he frequented are still running, and some of them have the same interior (the post WW1 atmosphere has changed). Hemingway discusses his newfound poverty, which came on suddenly after he quit journalism to write fiction. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F Scott Fitzgerald appear in multiple stories. It appears that Hemingway is unsparingly honest about all of them. His portrait of Fitzgerald is particularly poignant - he drinks too much, is a massive problem when he drinks, Zelda is a complete nightmare, and she encourages his drinking. Hemingway figures because she is jealous of his genius.

There are numerous descriptions about Parisian haunts (Sylvia Beach's bookshop, the Seine) foods, and fascinating conversations with French veterans and his little son.

This book is Ernest Hemingway's reminisce about his life in Paris in the 1920s and the literary figures he knew, such as Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was left unfinished at the time of Hemingway's death in 1961 and originally published in 1964, edited by his fourth and last wife, Mary. This new "restored" version presents the same book as re-edited by Hemingway's grandson Sean.

The original book is a highly-regarded literary work of art, leaving open the question of why the world needs a new version. The one and only advantage is the inclusion of new, previously unpublished chapters included after the main text, called "Additional Paris Sketches." Anything new written by Hemingway is always welcome.

The problem is Sean Hemingway's editing and the motivation behind it. In his Introduction, he would have us believe Mary somehow wrecked Hemingway's vision of the book and he has now reshuffled the chapters to reflect what his grandfather would have really wanted. Forty-five years after the original publication, Sean writes with what seems to me unusually strong venom at Mary and what he sees as her agenda in making her edits: "The extensive edits Mary Hemingway made to this text seem to have served her own personal relationship with the writer as his fourth and final wife, rather than the interests of the book, or of the author, who comes across in the posthumous first edition as something of an unknowing victim, which he clearly was not." Sean needed to provide some sort of rationale for the new edition, and this is what he would have us believe: the original book reflected Mary's wishes, not Ernest's.

But since the manuscript was left unfinished when Hemingway died, no one knows what he really would have wanted. There is no "definitive" edition and never can one be. Even worse, Sean can well be accused of the same sin as he asserts for Mary: his edits are designed specifically to paint his grandmother Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway's second wife and his own grandmother, in a far more favorable light. Readers and scholars can compare the two editions and judge for themselves: is Sean protecting his grandfather's true wishes--whatever they were--or is he doing a favor for his own grandmother at the expense of Hemingway's conception? Sean dug around in the archives and found some things that look good for his grandmother, included them, and rejiggered the original contents in her favor as well.

The good news surely must be that the various heirs of Hemingway can't destroy his work, no matter what their motivations. The text is still the work of one of the 20th century's greatest and most influential writers. Most readers won't need the new edition, as the original, as literature, hasn't really been improved upon. Scholars and Hemingway fans will want to see the new sketches. Probably 45 years into the future, a "scholar's" edition will be published, sans any input from the various heirs of Hemingway, in an attempt to "set the record straight."

I should stop reading Hemingway books, I just don't seem to understand his popularity although I understand he's a literary great I just don't like his writing. This will be the last EH book I read. To me the book was all about nada or nothing as one of the chapters is titled. He probably deserves his fame but I'm not a fan of his. Give me a Steinbeck book anytime. He's a great writer.

I'm posting here the 2009 op-ed piece by Hemingway's friend A. E. Hotchner of this altered version of Hemingway's memoir. Readers who are considering buying this edition deserve to know why Hotchner, the author of the best-selling literary memoir "Papa Hemingway" (1966), regarded this edition of "A Moveable Feast" as an act of literary vandalism by Hemingway's descendants. the store readers can judge for themselves.

Don’t Touch "A Moveable Feast"
By A. E. Hotchner
July 19, 2009

BOOKSTORES are getting shipments of a significantly changed edition of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, “A Moveable Feast,” first published posthumously by Scribner in 1964. This new edition, also published by Scribner, has been extensively reworked by a grandson who doesn’t like what the original said about his grandmother, Hemingway’s second wife.

The grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

It is his claim that Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s fourth wife, cobbled the manuscript together from shards of an unfinished work and that she created the final chapter, “There Is Never Any End to Paris.”

Scribner’s involvement with this bowdlerized version should be examined as it relates to the book’s actual genesis, and to the ethics of publishing.
In 1956, Ernest and I were having lunch at the Ritz in Paris with Charles Ritz, the hotel’s chairman, when Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s Louis Vuitton had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it.

Charley had the trunk brought up to his office, and after lunch Ernest opened it. It was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: “The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!”

There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a café crème. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life.

When Ernest returned to Cuba in 1957, he had Nita, his sometime secretary, type the stories on double-spaced pages to make them easy to edit.
When I visited the Hemingways in Ketchum, Idaho, in the fall of 1958, Ernest was at work on what he called “my Paris book.” He gave me several chapters to read. In 1959, when we were in Spain following the great matadors Antonio Ordóñez and Dominguín, Ernest often worked on the Paris manuscript on the days when there wasn’t a bullfight.

Back in Cuba, he suspended work on it to write “The Dangerous Summer,” about those bullfights, for Life magazine. But instead of the contracted 40,000 words, he wrote 108,746 and asked me to go to Cuba to help him pare down his manuscript.

When I was leaving for New York to give the manuscript to the editor of Life, Ernest also gave me the completed manuscript of the Paris book to give to Scribner’s president, Charles Scribner Jr.

I recount this history of “A Moveable Feast” to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it, and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication. Ernest died before the publication of the book could go forward. When I visited him in the Mayo Clinic a few months before his dementia led to his suicide, he was very concerned about his Paris book, and worried that it needed a final sentence, which it did not.

After his death, Mary, as executor, decided that Scribner should proceed with the publication. Harry Brague was the editor. I met with him several times while the book was in galleys.

Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book. However, she did call me about its title. Scribner was going to call it “Paris Sketches,” but Mary hoped I could come up with something more compelling. I ran through a few possibilities, but none resonated until I recalled that Ernest had once referred to Paris as a moveable feast. Mary and Scribner were delighted with that, but they wanted attribution. I wrote down what Ernest had said to the best of my recollection, and this appears on the title page attributed to a “friend,” which is the way I wanted it.

These details are evidence that the book was a serious work that Ernest finished with his usual intensity, and that he certainly intended it for publication. What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.

As an author, I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this “restored edition.” With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in “A Moveable Feast” about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor.

All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work. There is always the possibility that the inheritor could write his own book offering his own corrections.

Ernest was very protective of the words he wrote, words that gave the literary world a new style of writing. Surely he has the right to have these words protected against frivolous incursion, like this reworked volume that should be called “A Moveable Book.” I hope the Authors Guild is paying attention.

A. E. Hotchner is the author of the memoirs “Papa Hemingway” and “King of the Hill.”

You wouldn’t think that a mere “restored edition” of one of the most popular books ever published, Ernest Hemingway’s Paris memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” would provide any news or insights.

After all, Hemingway’s carcass has been picked over by at least 49,000 biographies since his death in 1961, 48, 999 of which I have read.

And I initially dismissed this “restored edition” when I read the self- indulgent nepotism, in the form of unnecessary introductions, by his son Patrick Hemingway and his grandson Sean Hemingway.

Boy was I wrong!

What Papa’s bloodlines have uncovered from the Hemingway archives at Harvard is that the popular first edition was heavily edited (and censored) by Hemingway’s fourth and final wife, Mary.

In particular, Mary made sure that the never completed introduction, which confirms that the entire memoir is essentially a love letter to his first wife Hadley, ever saw the light of day. This is contained in the ending section entitled “fragments,” Hemingway’s various drafts for an introduction.

Here are some of the sentences that Mary Hemingway did not want to see published:

“I have left out much and changed and eliminated and I hope Hadley understands. She is the heroine and the only person who had a life that turned out well and as it should except certain of the rich.” “She deserves everything good in life including accurate reporting.”

“There is never any end to Paris but maybe this will give you some true part of the people and places and the country when Hadley and I believed that we were invulnerable and that was the end of the first part of Paris.”

It is in the “Pilot and the Rich” chapter near the book’s end, that Hemingway admits he fell for the wealthy charms of his second wife Pauline, ruining the innocence of his true love for Hadley. While the Great Depression prices of the 1920s, when the dollar had enormous value against the weak French Franc, made it possible for Hemingway and Hadley and their son Bumby to survive and even live part of the year in Swiss hotels, Pauline’s wealth allowed him the financial security to write fiction full-time, a situation he had not enjoyed with Hadley, when he had to make frequent trips away from her to cover post World War I diplomatic conferences as a journalist, because they needed the money.

When I began reading Hemingway in the 1970s he was being dismissed as a male chauvinist whose female characters were inhumanly shallow and whose real talent was as a pretentious food critic, so replete were his novels filled with descriptions of good food and fine wine.

Yet by the 1980s I was reading Simone de Beauvoir, the greatest feminist of them all, a writer who not only admired Hemingway but did so to a degree that she modeled her own literary style after his. Female readers today, the beneficiary of an unintended feminist revival, single-handedly achieved by the boorish degrading of women by Donald Trump, can now reevaluate “A Moveable Feast” through the prism of time.

The prism of time reveals a Hemingway in these pages apologizing for his own, at times, overbearing, boorish, selfish behavior, and makes clear he understood that Hadley had sacrificed her own career as a pianist to his as a writer. In this startling admission of his desertion of Hadley, he writes, “He had the irreplaceable early training of a bastard and a latent and long denied love of money.”

Hemingway portrays the rich Pauline as a stalker of talent, not uncommon in the arts world. He’s not accusing her of being a “traditional home wrecker,” but rather a rich woman buying the innocent happiness of the naïve, the naïve being he and Hadley.

“When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds at night to a powerful beacon.” Of course, this is more than a comment on the rich buying what they want. It is a universal observation that the unhappy will destroy the happiness of others, or try to acquire it, in a kind of corporate takeover, as it were.

In one of the most remorseful confessions in world literature, Hemingway owns up to his abandonment of Hadley, his one true love:

“When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work on a book so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both. Then the one who is relentless wins.

“The wife does not know about it and trusts the husband. The new one says you cannot really love her if you love your wife too. She does not say that at the start. That comes later when the murder’s done.”

You might say that Hemingway got what he deserved for leaving Hadley for the new and exciting and variety and wealth of Pauline, and many have. And you and they may be right.

Yet to call leaving your first wife for your second wife “murder” is a metaphor that shows a level of contrition that is extraordinary and brutally honest to a degree that few men could own up to. And demonstrates the extreme sensitivity that made Hemingway, good and bad, what he was as a writer and man.

These updates and observations about the “restored” “A Moveable Feast” do not, of course, explain the unique charm of the stories and why you may have read the original edition and now will read this one.

Despite grumblings over the years of how rude certain Parisians or Parisian waiters may have been, I have NEVER, EVER, heard anybody say Paris is not a beautiful, haunting, inviting city.

That is the advantage Hemingway works from in his delightful descriptions of the city which is the core of this classic book. You, the reader, may now begin:

“Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe.”

[Hansen Alexander’s new work of creative nonfiction is HOW THE LIONS ATE TIM TEBOW.]

The relative merits of the two versions aside, the restored edition lacks the charm of the original. One can say what one wishes about the editing of the original, but whoever edited it did a beautiful job: an incomplete and at times awkward and rambling manuscript was fashioned into a finished work of art. The spirit of Hemingway's intent is just better conveyed by the original. For example, Sean Hemingway takes issue with the change to the introductory note to the chapter entitled "Scott Fitzgerald" as it appears in the original. Mr. Hemingway claims that, as edited, it takes an unwarranted swipe at Fitzgerald. But that is exactly what the restored edition does: in not one new portion is Fitzgerald portrayed as anything but a flawed personality - a talented drunk, a bumbler, with silly ideas and habits, dominated by Zelda. Another aspect of the new edition I find unsettling is that the restored portions more often than not reveal a nastier Hemingway. And insofar as it attempting to portray an even more sympathetic Hadley, I disagree. The original quite poetically tells us all we need to know. The restored version merely states the obvious - tediously and at length. I first read the original edition when I was in college and loved it. I still do. I suppose the restored version has its scholarly value, but I would not recommend it to an impressionable young person as a lovely introduction to the world of the Lost Generation.

As good a copy as any of the bare bones copies of A Moveable Feast, this paperback version provides the reader with no commentary, but just the beautiful autobiography of Ernest Hemingway's time in Paris. Struggling to become a writer, he immerses himself in an attempt to make his words work while examining the lives of other writers who had "made it", most notably F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A Moveable Feast is a real look into the life of Ernest and he holds very little back. He talks about sex, about writing, about food and hunger, and about travel and what it does to an individual. He expresses interest in languages and concerns for the future with a quiet dignity and humor that helps us to see him as a singular individual with just as many problems as the rest of us.

This narrow view into his time in Paris is exemplary and offers us hope for our own writing and thoughts.

In 1928, Ernest Hemingway stored two steamer trunks at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and didn’t retrieve them until 1956. Inside the trunks were notes and papers from his days in Paris, during the time when he wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and was married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson.

Seeing these notes prompted Hemingway to begin working on a memoir of his days in Paris, where he was part of the expatriate community of writers, artists and creative minds, known now as the “Lost Generation”, a term attributed to Gertrude Stein. By the 1950s, however, Hemingway was suffering from many conditions, injuries resulting from two serious plane crashes, poor eyesight, depression and different paranoias. He committed suicide in 1961, leaving the book unfinished. After his death, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, edited the manuscript and the first edition of A Moveable Feast was published in 1964.

My interest in the Lost Generation started a few years ago after I read The Sun Also Rises and then read more about Paris in the 1920s and of the talented writers and artists who lived there and met in the city’s cafés. Then I read The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, a terrific historical fiction about Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson. After that, it only made sense to go back to the source, A Moveable Feast.

It’s fascinating to me that so many talented people were all together in Paris. Did they know they were part of this creative burst? Some of the well-knowns were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Others included Wyndham Lewis, Ford Maddux Ford, and Ernest Walsh, names I didn’t know, but enjoyed reading about.

The book reads a lot like Hemingway’s fiction. His simple writing style is identical. Hemingway presents a vivid picture of this time period and, in particular, talks easily about his relationships with Hadley, Stein, and Fitzgerald. I liked reading about his disciplined approach to writing and his desire for perfection. He was very focused on writing what he called “true” sentences and was not happy unless he had put in a productive time writing, often in cafés or in a sparse rented room. I think he makes it very clear how hard writing is and how devoted and conscientious a writer must be.

"I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day."

Hemingway and Hadley seemed very happy in their marriage, despite being poor. He describes an easy and affectionate relationship. This is, of course, before his affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife. He seems to deeply regret hurting Hadley and writes:

"The bulldozing of three people’s hearts to destroy one happiness and build another and the love and the good work and all that came out of it is not part of this book. I wrote it and left it out. It is a complicated, valuable and instructive story. How it all ended, finally, has nothing to do with this either. Any blame in that was mine to take and possess and understand. The only one, Hadley, who had no possible blame, ever, came well out of it finally and married a much finer man than I ever was or could hope to be and is happy and deserves it and that was one good and lasting thing that came of that year."

His relationship with the American writer and art collector, Gertrude Stein, gave him confidence, but lasted only a few years. In the book, Hemingway explains the friendship and tries to understand why it ended.

Hemingway also discusses his friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, including Scott’s marriage to Zelda. He recognizes a great talent, but even before Hemingway meets Zelda, he can see Fitzgerald’s life and marriage spiraling. After reading The Great Gatsby, Hemingway understands his role as a friend.

"When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how preposterously he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find out soon enough."

Other topics include horse racing, boxing, eating, drinking and writing in cafés, skiing in the Austrian Alps and the story of how Hadley lost all his papers and previous manuscripts on a train. I very much enjoyed reading about Hemingway during this time, although I'm sure it is subjective. I had read that Hemingway was very difficult to live with - that seems to be left out here, except for one reference to his own hot temper.

My earlier impression of an aimless group of hard-drinking and pleasure-seeking writers and artists changed a bit after reading his account and I recommend the book to anyone who wants to know more about Hemingway and this group.

While A Movable Feast is not the typical memoir in that it doesn’t have the written liquid flow like other memoirs do (my opinion), it is still a remarkable book, because it captures, quite convincingly, the essence of 1920s Paris and of all the writers and artists (struggling and otherwise) who embodied, as Gertrude Stein coined it: “The Lost Generation.” Made up of a rough hodgepodge of written remembrances by Hemingway, which were later culled by his son Patrick and grandson Séan respectively, the work gives a remarkable sweeping reflection into what life was like back then. In it he details places where he lived, the cafes, hotels, bars and restaurants where he ate, drank, socialized and wrote. He also writes about the hordes of fascinating people that he saw and interacted with, some of whom I would never have expected: Catholic author Hilaire Belloc, the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley, Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company who published James Joyce’s novel Ulysses to a smattering of other artistic luminaries and literati. And while they were all acclaimed in their own way or at least trying to be, that didn’t mean that Hemingway fully liked or embraced them. Read about his reflections on Ford Madox Ford. Often, he would come off as irascible and bothered by the pretentiousness of it all and the celebration of it. At one point, he wanted to go ballistic on a hanger-on wannabe prose writer who infiltrated his cafe where he did the bulk of his writing and actually had the audacity to tell him that his writing was too linear!

One underlying aspect that I appreciated in A Movable Feast was about being poor and being content to be so until one’s efforts and works gradually got you elevated to a better financial and social standing. In reading this work, I got a better understanding on how he operated, a glimpse of a master at work. Even when he was resting after hours of endless writing, he was constantly observing and listening, taking in all the sights and sounds to be used for later written works. And during his respites from writing, he was always good at treating himself. Hemingway’s recollections about the joy of simple and frugal living was something that really touched me, for he found his happiness with his family, at the horse track, boxing, food and wine, the bookstore, the outdoors and simple picnics. He didn’t take things for granted. And while he was not monetarily wealthy, he was rich in intellect and curiousity. And because of that, it was no wonder that he was a beacon of light at any French salon, cafe or bar. However, it was not always so civil and prim and proper. F. Scott Fitzgerald definitely had some characteristics of a paranoid and toxic personality. When reading about his wife Zelda she came off as a woman who was not only Fitzgerald’s anchor and inspiration, but she could also, unfortunately, make him sink, which she did, sadly, on more than one occasion. And Hemingway’s take on them seems quite spot-on and even sympathetic. Two very unique brothers. Considering that this book was posthumously published, it was so jam packed with stories and experiences. Hemmingway’s voice is resonant, like an overwhelming embracement into his world. He and his past shine through, raw and unadorned.

This memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris in the early 1920s contains observations on writing and writers, comments on members of the “lost generation,” snippets of life in Paris, and reflections on the impact these years in Paris had on Hemingway’s later life. This is the “restored edition,” which includes additional material not in the original edition edited by Hemingway’s fourth (and final) wife Mary. Editor and Hemingway grandson Seán Hemingway provides a nice introduction describing the differences between this edition and the original one, and the reasons for his editorial decisions. He also captures nicely what writing is all about when he notes Hemingway’s “ability to discern the gold from the dross and turn his observations into prose,” an ability which Hemingway first developed during the time remembered in this book.

Ernest and his wife Hadley were poor, but Hemingway mentions more than once how happy they were. He also notes how being hungry “sharpens all of your perceptions,” so that even paintings are viewed differently. Apparently there is nothing quite like going to a museum on an empty stomach, though Hemingway also emphasizes the importance of finding routes through the city that do not take one past restaurants or bakeries that would simply intensify the hunger pangs.

Of course, many of Hemingway’s friends and associates (and rivals) in Paris were other writers, artists, or people associated with writing (like Sylvia Beach, who ran the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris but was so much more than a bookshop owner). His observations on these writers are scattered throughout the book and regularly ground the narrative in the expatriate literary life of Paris during the interwar years. The poet Ezra Pound is described in completely positive term: generous, loyal, a good friend. Hemingway’s contempt for Ford Madox Ford, on the other hand, is undisguised, though consciously and admittedly so. Though Gertrude Stein comes across as pompous, Hemingway’s view of her is generally positive early on, somewhat less so later. His portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda is fascinating and more extensive than any others. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were friends, but while Hemingway clearly admires his best writing, he also thinks he could have done much more. He is distressed about his friend’s heavy drinking, and is not favorably disposed toward Zelda, whom he describes as envious of Scott’s writing.

As one might expect, there are numerous observations about writing, including perhaps most famously Hemingway’s description of the reminder he would deliver to himself when he got stuck in his writing: “’Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence and then go on from there.” But this is not primarily a book about writing, and many of Hemingway’s other observations are small gems. About Ezra Pound he notes that “he liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment.” And there is this brief portrait of the Paris years, which contains volumes in a few words: “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 in the moonlight beside you.”

There’s a poignancy to some of the writing, with hints of the heartbreak and betrayal that were also part of the Paris years. Hemingway has the perspective of decades as he writes, but with this hindsight comes a degree of cynicism about younger days and their innocence. This emerges most noticeably as he casts backward glances (made most obvious in one of the sketches added to this edition) at a simpler time before his first marriage ended as a result of his romance with Pauline, who became his second wife (and was the grandmother of Séan, editor of this volume). The final paragraph in the chapter titled “Winters in Schruns” is a remarkable description. It starts: “The last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and nothing was ever the same again. The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood compared to that winter and the murderous summer that was to follow. Hadley and I had become too confident in each other and careless in our confidence and pride.” Though Hemingway offers no details on “the bulldozing of three people’s hearts to destroy one happiness and build another,” details are not needed. The episode is more powerfully described as an almost entirely interior event.

I have read only a couple of Hemingway’s novels, but the same straight-ahead writing style that characterized them is found in this memoir. It serves the purpose well, offering a largely unadorned portrait of a time and a place that were formative for the craft and the sensibilities of the man who, in 1954, became one of the handful of Americans to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Arguably, Ernest Hemingway was the greatest American writer of the twentieth century. Because it is probably unfair to declare one author greater than another of their contemporaries when their styles and methods varied so much—William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald spring to mind—such an accolade should probably be qualified by “among the greatest.” But I would still put Hemingway in first place, if only because his style was so unique and his reach so vast: he not only penned a handful of truly great novels—The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls—but also dozens of magnificent short stories, including “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” plus the semi-autobiographical “Nick Adams” tales, as well as the striking vignettes inserted between the stories in the published collections. And that was just his fiction. His roots as a skilled journalist made manifest the staccato bursts of short sentences that became his signature style, and without a doubt served as the basis for his ability to witness people and events and distill it all into captivating prose. Whether you are fascinated or repulsed (or a little of both!) by bull fighting or big game hunting, there are probably no better chronicles of these pursuits than, respectively, Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway’s genius for nonfiction is again underscored in A Moveable Feast, a memoir first published posthumously in 1964 by his fourth wife Mary, and then controversially re-edited and re-released in this “restored edition,” by his grandson Sean.
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,” Hemingway wrote, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." This marvelous book is a collection of sketches of that “moveable feast” by that talented but penurious young man who lived in Paris in the early 1920s, struggling to earn a living as a foreign correspondent while perfecting his fiction, reading everything he could lay his hands on, skipping meals to finance trips to the race track, skiing in the most primitive conditions, drinking up a storm at cafés, and glorying in a whirlwind of activities with his first wife (Hadley Richardson, with whom here he is very much in love), and a gaggle of literary expatriates whose names read like a catalog of authors from the spines of books on the shelf of a fine personal library: John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and many others.
Revealed here is a kinetic energy and optimism in the young “Hem,” as well as an admiration and respect for other artists conspicuously absent in his later years. This version of Hemingway is extremely likeable: gregarious, curious, kind, considerate; craving the friendship and attention of both the famous and the little-known characters in his orbit. It was this fecund period that spawned The Sun Also Rises, his first novel and one of his finest. Later in life, his talent for his craft visibly diminished, lost to excessive alcohol, punishing physical injuries, and a kind of vulgar, outsize grandstanding that turned him into something of caricature of himself. He could often be mercurial, violent, boastful, immature; a mean drunk, a lousy husband, frequently a bad friend who was envious and resentful of another’s success, and spiteful enough to conspicuously malign them (as he did Scott Fitzgerald, more than once) in his writings. Thus it is that Hemingway’s episodic account of his early years in this volume is so energizing for the reader—revisiting a lost era of Paris between two devastating world wars, guided by a young man on the very cusp of becoming a great writer who is at once full of love for his lady and his life—yet nevertheless colored by the poignancy of the knowledge of what lies ahead for both Paris and its protagonist.
In 1956, Hemingway rediscovered two small steamer trunks that he had stored and forgotten at the Hotel Ritz Paris nearly three decades before, full of the notebooks he had kept during the 1920s. These were the primary sources for A Moveable Feast, which is why it reads with such freshness and optimism. Hemingway transcribed and edited these as a basis for a memoir he never completed. After his 1961 suicide, his fourth and final wife Mary reworked this manuscript for publication, putting changes to his draft that some have criticized. Also criticized with some greater vehemence is this “restored edition,” reworked yet again by his grandson Sean Hemingway, and containing additional material. As with all posthumous works, we can only wonder what the living author would have wanted us to read. But all of that is of less consequence to the reader than the wonder of this gift to us from that author. Again and again, throughout this volume, I came upon paragraphs written nearly a century ago by a man I consider the finest literary artist of his generation that took my breath away. Paragraphs such as:

The worst thing I remember of that avalanche winter was one man who was dug out. He had squatted down and made a box with his arms in front of his head, as we had been taught to do, so that there would be air to breathe as the snow rose up over you. It was a huge avalanche and it took a long time to dig everyone out, and this man was the last to be found. He had not been dead long and his neck was worn through so that the tendons and the bone were visible. He had been turning his head from side to side against the pressure of the snow. In this avalanche there must have been some old, packed snow mixed in with the new light snow that had slipped. We could not decide whether he had done it on purpose or if he had been out of his head. But there was no problem because he was refused burial in consecrated ground by the local priest anyway; since there was no proof he was a Catholic.

And that is why you read Hemingway! Not because you are impressed by the man he was, or the caricature of the man he came to personify, although both of these are fascinating. Not because of his utilization of the “objective correlative” as a literary device, although he did employ it masterfully. Not because he could tell us stories about wars, and bulls, and illuminated cafés, but he certainly knew such stories and told them well. But because he was truly an outstanding writer who frequently bestowed upon us truly great literature. This is why A Moveable Feast is required reading not only for the Hemingway aficionado, but for anyone who wants to experience such an artist at the height of his form. Paris may have been Hemingway’s moveable feast, but our very own moveable feast might be found in the books of glorious prose he has bequeathed to us. With that in mind, I will let Hemingway conclude this review of his work with his own words rather than that of the reviewer:

Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places. I do not know about that now but this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

Since I`ve long been intrigued by memoirs and autobiographical writings ( especially when penned by artists and writers) and cultural history, I was eager to read a book that combined both. Hemingway`s concise yet detailed account of his life in Paris in the 1920`s is a gem, easily transporting the reader back to an era that is often not as lauded as it used to be. A Moveable Feast tells the story of the author`s early days as a writer: he and his wife subsist on an austere budget, living on his newspaper salary, odd jobs by wife Hadley, and their winnings at the local racetrack. Despite the lack of money, there is no shortage of cheap quality food at both the local markets and cafes.
The cafes are also a convenient place to meet with the rich variety of creative people living in Paris at this time. I enjoyed Hemingway`s vivid descriptions of his friends and fellow artists. Highlights include his reverent portrayal of poet Ezra Pound and an account of a long, drunken road trip with close friend F Scott Fitzgerald ( complete with Fitzgerald`s health paranoia in which he confuses a severe hangover with several illnesses}! Certain passages reminded me of Kerouac`s tales of his travel adventures, the main difference being that Hem. never uses pseudonyms for those he hung out with.

In this age of cell phones and the internet, it`s easy to take something like sending a manuscript out for editing for granted. Back in the 20`s, it was still a laborious process, and there is a lot of detail about the time involved in writing, revising, and safely mailing a finished manuscript back to one`s editor, as Hemingway had to do on a regular basis. The book evokes the technology, art, and even fashions of its time in an absorbing way. It does help a bit if you already like the literary and artistic people mentioned, yes, but there are also fascinating chapters on skiing and the Paris nightlife, even its less savory dive bars. And as an added treat for cat lovers, we get to hear about F Puss, the author`s cat at the time, who was accustomed to sit in the crib with Hemingway`s young son and gaze at the world with his "great yellow eyes." A Moveable Feast is indeed a rich repast.

Hemmingway can be an acquired taste- with his pithy prose, bare bones structure, and incredibly disappointing portrayals of women, it may not be your jam. I still have a lot of trouble with the way he and his buddy Fitzgerald wrote all their ladies to be the most self-centered, dilettante, brainlessly naive or ruthlessly scheming, bad-dialogued, flat characters on the planet (Yeah, some time I'll tell you how I REALLY feel.) But this book is so different.

Although many of Hemmingway's books have autobiographical elements, A Moveable Feast feels the most raw and sensitive of his work. You can see the man as author making mistakes and even (gasp) acknowledging them. It allowed me to see the man behind the caricature behind. It's like getting Hemmingway's origin story. And it's beautiful prose about a lovely time in Paris.

Whether you Hate Hemmingway or love him, don't miss this one.

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his time in Paris in the 1920s, is nostalgic for people interested in Paris or literature. Hemingway’s short chapters contain accounts of daily habits, anecdotes, vignettes, conversations, relationships, and observations. The edition I read also contains some photos. The book includes some skiing trips to Austria, too.

A reader of A Moveable Feast glimpses Gertrude Stein’s hospitality, quirks, and opinions, Ezra Pound’s kindness and generosity, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s struggles, Sylvia Beach’s (whom Hemingway’s little son called Silver Beach) bookstore and editing/publishing roles, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and others from that era. Hemingway also tells his opinions of these colleagues, and he even shares how the nickname “the lost generation” really was created. He calls the term an “easy, dirty label.”

As a Francophile, I of course enjoyed picturing Parisian cafes and life there in the 1920s. In one story about hunger being good discipline, Hemingway describes the route he would walk in order to not smell food he could not afford. While reading A Moveable Feast, I liked being “in” Paris.

As I writer, I was especially interested in his disciplines. He often wrote in cafés over a café crème or an eau de vie. I could see how this venue could inspire his descriptions as he watched the world go by. I could not see how he could concentrate for hours on end in a café setting. He jumped over writer’s block by the practice of writing “one true sentence.” Hmmm. I could try that. He discussed egotism and mental laziness. Good to be aware of those tendencies and guard against both. When he was writing fiction, he had a method for tricking his subconscious at the end of a workday and being fresh to pick up the story the next day. I could try that, too. Famous authors often advise writers to read a lot, and I do that. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway from time to time mentions what he is reading. I wish he had detailed how his readings influenced him as a person or as a writer. Some of his “camarades de café” such as Evan Shipman, Ezra Pound, and Sherwood Anderson piqued my curiosity to read their writings.

My favorite line and fervent prayer for all writers was on page 17 of my edition: “The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.”

Hemingway lived an extremely unique and interesting life. He was an ambulance driver in World War One. After that war he lived in Paris and associated with many other artists of varying degrees of success. These individuals became known as the "lost generation". This is a retrospective of that time. Hemingway mentions many of the artists he associated with along with describing his personal life. I have read many of Hemingway's works and re read his novels in chronological order. When I read A Moveable Feast I felt as though I was reading a captivating, literary, punctuation point at the end of a fascinating life...

A Moveable Feast is one of those memoirs you can read again, and again—especially if you are a writer, or aspiring to be one. In the exemplary Hemingway style of exquisite simplicity, he paints a loving portrait of the Paris he shared with his first wife, Hadley in the 1920’s, while weaving in his remarkable friendships with Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford and other notable expats. Writers will home in on Hemingway’s rituals around writing. In a later chapter, Hemingway writes about their time skiing in the Alps. It is a lovely and somewhat metaphorical chapter that bleeds into a poignant bitter reflection written with the clarity that decades of hind-sight provided.
I read the original 1964 edition with the Black & White cover of Paris café which is the preferred edition of most literary folk. You can find this edition in a used bookstore.

A book written in a memoir genre 35-38 years after the events would always cause reflections on the vagaries of human memory. Hemingway excuses himself at the beginning of A Moveable Feast by stating that this is a book of fiction, and at the end of it when he eloquently writes: ‘This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist’. The brain ‘tampered with’ may be a reference to the electroshock therapy he was receiving at the time to treat his depression. His heart was still in place but battered in the emotional turmoil of which there was enough in his fascinating and controversial life. The book is written with a detached irony, sometimes turning into sarcasm, on occasion to vitriol. Hemingway’s chronicle of his life in the mid-1920’s Paris and a few of his travel destinations should be read, I think, with a reciprocal sense of a benevolent withdrawnness. A degree of aloofness in the reader’s mind enables the enjoyment of the author’s literary style while de-emphasizing the opinions themselves. Hemingway would not claim a definitive judgment over his characters anyway. The book, first and foremost, is a Hemingway’s self-portrait en plein air with Paris all around him. It has discovered a number of literary names for me (most English, most sunk into oblivion). The gallery of portraits featured in the book is personal to Hemingway’s experience. It is very incomplete, hardly even representative of the creative life in Paris at the time. A Moveable Feast has a charming effect of time travel to the past long gone to meet people long dead. Hemingway’s writing is characteristically succinct yet vibrant and immediate. Engage your imagination and travel memories, and you will easily get there and then. Some of the Hemingway’s crowd may even offer you a drink … or a harsh opinion on your outfit. The book is amusing in many of its parts: the episodes of F.Scott Fitzgerald’s hypochondria are among the best humor written in English. There is no need to focus on, or feel incensed by, Hem’s negativism. Would A Moveable Feast turn me away from reading the poets and writers portrayed in the book? – No. Would it lead me on to reading Hemingway’s Short Stories and ‘The Sun Also Rises’? – Yes.

There is some five star writing in this rough, postumously published and edited memoir. But it's not a finished product, and there is a certain meanness about Hemingway that this memoir reveals. Other than Ezra Pound, he trashes every writer he ever knew over in Paris.

In the various draft introductions to the memoir appended at the end, Hemingway characterizes his memoir as a work of fiction -- i.e., he took some poetic license in the interest of achieving some higher truth. One suspects that considerable license was taken in the chapters on Fitzgerald and Ford, neither of whom could posssibly be as nasty as suggested by Hemingway. Hemingway appears to be quite jealous of Fitzgerald. Perhaps Fitzgerald was as insufferable and as bad a drunk as portrayed. But it does appear that Hemingway made up some tales in an effort to bury Fitzgerald's reputation for good. I don't believe a word of the bizarre conversation between the two about Fitzgerald's small penis -- and the ridiculous scene of Hemingway inspecting Fitzgerald in the bathroom and offering to take him to the Louvre to compare his equipment. Although Hemingway probably thought this would make Fitzgerald a laughing stock for all time, it actually makes him look bad. Zelda may have made a catty, cutting remark, but neither the episode nor Hemingway's fake sympathy is believable. And Hemingway would blow a gasket if he knew a modern reader would see all sorts of latent homosexuality on Hemingway's part.

Fitzgerald's revenge may be that he is rated a better writer by modern critics, though I do think Hemingway's stock will come back. Still, I tend to prefer guys like Fitzgerald and Dreiser, who don't write as well as Hemingway, but who seem better able to connect emotionally with the reader.

There is some brilliant writing here. I particularly like Hemingway's discussion of the end of his marriage and the dilemma of being in love with two women. There is a confessional tone and humbleness you don't often see from Hemingway, as well as an emotional element that comes off as quite sincere. Also striking are all the descriptions of life in Paris and Europe in the 20s, and nostalgia for a bygone era.

So there is much that is very good and even great in this memoir -- and some that is regrettable. Take the bad with the good.

Some love Hemingway (1917 – 1961) and some hate him, but no one can say he didn't have a huge influence on American writing of the 20th century—and beyond. I can't think of an author who's easier to imitate and parody and who so often is. That should be an insult and is when it applies to someone like Donald Trump, but here it attests to how strong and distinctive his style was.
"A Moveable Feast" is a posthumously published memoir about Hemingway's years in Paris after World War I, and includes passages about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. (The book is a must for Fitzgerald readers.) It made me sad to know that I did not live in those years, in Paris, which Hemingway describes as "the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is."
This is the first real memoir material of Hemingway's I've read, and at times I found it strange to read sentences in his style about things less dramatic than big game hunting, bull fighting, and war. As good as it is, a sentence like, "I had never been able to read a novel by Ouida, not even at some skiing place in Switzerland where reading material had run out when the wet south wind had come and there were only the left-behind Tauchnitz editions of before the war," almost sounds like a parody. But those sentences are rare, and reading this makes you appreciate how important, and even dangerous in its way, writing was to Hemingway.

Published posthumously in 1964 (3 years after Papa died), this somewhat scattered memoir covers his years as a young writer living in Paris. You may already know the title comes from a passage in the book, "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."

For most of the memoir, Hemingway was married to his 1st wife, Hadley, containing the poignant description that, “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 had ever loved anyone but her." Of course, this was just prior to his leaving her for his next wife.

A MOVEABLE FEAST contains some wonderful tips for writers starting out and is a fascinating look at those heady days in Paris, with significant (sometimes overly nasty) parts covering, respectively, a friendly Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, a charismatic James Joyce, Gertrude Stein (whom Hemingway described as resembling a "Roman soldier"), Ford Madox Ford (who seemed to have been awfully foul-smelling) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose wife Zelda apparently made him remarkably self-conscious about the caliber of his reproductive equipment).

As Christopher Hitchens so aptly explained the continued fascination with this memoir, it's "an ur-text of the American enthrallment with Paris," "a skeleton key to the American literary fascination with Paris...." And it serves the nostalgia of Hemingway "at the end of his distraught days, as he saw again the 'City of Light' with his remaining life still ahead of him rather than so far behind."

Any fan of Ernest Hemingway should read one of his last major works- A Moveable Feast- published posthumously in 1964. This book along with the later Islands In the Stream (1970) were the two novels which helped solidify his then-sagging reputation as a truly gifted author who was not "washed up", as Hemingway feared he was in the late 1950's. A Moveable Feast is a "walking tour" of Paris and surrounding regions in which Hemingway recalls his youth, starting from late 1921 through 1926. Newly married to Hadley Richardson, Hemingway was a struggling young journalist for the Toronto Star newspaper who wrote articles on various subjects to earn a living while he contemplated becoming a serious author. His experiences in and around Paris are worth noting- as they laid the foundation for his emergence as a writer to follow in the 1920's. His first novel- The Sun Also Rises- was written here and even though readers today might find that book a bit too focused on eating and drinking and sleeping with other people's spouses, it did portray the Roaring Twenties in a realistic way. Many people don't focus on the fact that Hemingway and other writers and artists from America went to Paris partly because they could do some exploring while enjoying free-flowing alcohol- which was not available in the United States due to Prohibition. Hemingway appears to have cultivated his taste for many different wines and other beverages while in Paris- a habit which would expand significantly in his later years. A Moveable Feast is an interesting collection of remembrances- places he walked, cafes where he dined, conversations with Gertrude Stein, who called him and his compatriots "a Lost Generation", bars like the Closerie de Lilas where he met with other famous or soon to be famous people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, John dos Passos, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and many others. Paris in the 1920's must have been a fascinating place to be- and A Moveable Feast tells the story quite well. It will make you want to stroll the streets yourself, exploring back alleyways and stopping in at cafes to enjoy some fresh bread, cheese and yes- a fine glass of wine... I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes Hemingway and others who simply want to expand their knowledge of this important time period.
-Gene Pisasale, author of "Lafayette's Gold- The Lost Brandywine Treasure", "Abandoned Address- The Secret of Frick's Lock" and other books
www.GenePisasale.com

I did not read this book for this critique. I didn't have to. I've read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast at least ten times, probably more. There's always been a copy somewhere anywhere I've lived, since I first encountered it ages ago. I re-read it frequently--at least twice a year. These days, it sits on our book table in the living room, and I often pick it up, open it at random, and read a bit. While it doesn't have the focused poetic brilliance of Hemingway's best short stories, it is probably his most humane work. His love for Hadley Richardson glows throughout, especially when he confesses his regrets for throwing it away, in the final chapters. His love for Paris, in "the early days when we were very poor and very happy," the best place to write in, he says, that ever was, his love for Paris fills the book with a soft revealing light as well. I myself have lived in Paris, and though what I wrote there was no good, writing there was good, in the tiny extra room of my cousin's apartment, opposite the cemetery in Montmartre. But that's another story....

While the book is truly a memoir of Paris between the wars, it is also perhaps the only place where Hemingway writes willingly about the craft of writing. He writes of his own work, and of that of other writers he knew during that time. Paris--inexpensive then--attracted plenty of well-known English-language authors, and Hemingway talks about James Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others whose company he kept when he lived there, people who advised him, and that he advised in turn, people who were his friends as well as his colleagues. The little book's pages are rich with casual critical analyses, not always praiseful--Stein's refusal to rewrite her work dismays him, and Fitzgerald's practice of writing the "real" short story and then tweaking it to make it commercially appealing to magazines nearly infuriates Hemingway--but Hemingway is pretty modest about his own craft. He talks about how hard it was to invent the now-famous "Hemingway style," and how perhaps overdoing the understatement led him to where, he says, speaking of his potential audience, he had "gotten them to the point where they didn't understand them" at all. Sales were rare for him in those days, and money tight, and his aesthetic principles merciless.

He also talks of the practice of writing: how a quiet room and little rituals helped him work; how skipping out on social pleasures was important if they were the sort of pleasures that would interfere with the work (as they interfered with Fitzgerald's); how it was important always to stop working before you had expended all your conceptions, so you would have someplace to start from the next day. There are several passages about the dangers of praise to a writer, and how he succumbed to it himself, and the things it ruined. There's nothing about what your style should be; plenty about how to achieve your style. Plenty about the relationships writing fiction has with the culture around you and the commercial mechanisms that connect writing with that culture, which writing itself in part creates.

My own favorite discovery came when Hemingway mentions he was a reader of Georges Simenon, the impossibly prolific author of both a detective series and dozens of straight novels, and one of the best writers I've encountered in any language. As Hemingway did, I read Simenon in French, and the Belgian author's influence on Hemingway's style seems inescapable to me, though a real critic would probably disagree. I also see an influence of Hemingway's style in English on Camus in French, which, if true, would bring it all full-circle

I loved this book before I visited Paris; I loved this book before I started writing seriously. And because of this book, I was able to love Paris more; because of it I have been able to write better, more truly, more humanely.

A Moveable Feast is the last piece of writing that Hemingway finished before his suicide in 1961. It was first published after his death. He can't have wished for a more brilliant valedictory.

More on my Blog: http://chorescanwait.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/a-moveable-feast/

Started and finished: 7/17/2014-7/19/2014
Rating: 3 stars (out of five)

Would I read again?
No-It’s like reading someone’s diary. You shouldn’t have read it in the first place!

Would I recommend?
Yes. Only to people who have read “The Paris Wife” or have knowledge of the “lost generation” will appreciate and understand the book. I had once tried to read this years ago not having any background on Hemingway and abandoned the book.

Book Summary:
The book, in my opinion, acts like Hemingway’s diary; set in Paris, the author provides a candid opinion of his famous friends and immortalizes his first wife, Hadley. The best parts of the book is when Hemingway writes about himself: he writes of his humble begins- how hungry he gets, his insights and how his craft comes together. Each chapter is a short story on different place and time spent with friends, always ending with a beautiful sentiment or thought that leaves you wanting a little more.

Book Review:
Together, the stories are in essence - A Moveable Feast. The collection of stories is a smorgasbord of delicacies laid out like a feast for the readers. We move from one course to the next and left satisfied at the end, saving the dessert (tribute to Hadley) for last. He writes of many incredible talents of this generation and offers the reader a glimpse into their struggles, spirit and soul. Gertrude Stein’s personality leads to end of their friendship. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald zany love triangles solidifies his hate for Zelda. Pascin is given a nod and Hemingway ends with writing beautifully about his wife and son, Hadley and Bumby.

Favorite Quotes
“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.” (p.104)
ME: Pascin kills himself in real life shortly after this encounter with Hemingway at the Dome. What an eerie and poignant thought about one’s destiny. I love the imagery of the seeds and how it cannot be removed; it is only covered up by dirt. Laughter and jokes make your world that much better place to be in.

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.” (p. 62)
ME: I think this speaks so much of how people recover and cope with the good and bad things that happen in life. This statement is so universal in so many ways.

“I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of the every day that is wasted in your life.” (p.166)
ME: Seize the day! I am always told that I was the worst person on vacation. I could never just relax. My thoughts were always one step ahead of me. I had to do something.

“I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone.” (p.211)

“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has live in it differs from that of any other.” (p.211)

Random thoughts:
I decided to read this book after I read The Paris Wife, a book that is written in Hadley’s point of view. I always thought that I did not like Hemingway’s writing but now will retract that statement forever. This man is a brilliant writer who by his words invokes the reader’s feelings; he does not tell them how to feel, instead he creates stories. However, I still do not care for the Hemingway, the man himself- he was a cheat and careless with his friends. I do think that he is a creative troubled soul and I appreciate his love for a good story.

I am happy that I put aside my prejudice against the man to read this book and experience his craft. I would give anything to have witnessed and be part of his creative circle of friends that Gertrude Stein labels, “the lost generation.” Can you imagine being surrounded and in the company of such talented poets, writers and painters? People hardly talk of anything creative at work or in life. They are too busy taking selfies rather than creating stories.
I am happily proven wrong about Hemingway.

After the closing credits in Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris, I got out my phone and ordered Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast right from the theater before even getting up from my seat. When it came I read and savored it, much like an unforgettable meal at an outdoor cafe on the Left Bank in Paris in the 1920's. Hemingway was a young man, an up and coming writer, still hungry and honing his craft.

The short stories in Hemingway's Paris memoir are amazing. He moved to Paris in 1921 after the First World War and became a member of the circle of expatriate writers and artists working and residing there. His "Paris Wife" Hadley is remembered fondly here as is his son. Through Hemingway's eyes we meet Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and more, seeing through the veneers of their literary reputations and coming to know them as real people. His talks of authors and books with Gertrude Stein is a form of art in itself, the kind of sparkling, intelligent conversation so sorely lacking in modern society.

I especially enjoyed reading Hemingway's thoughts on writing ("All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.") It is sheer joy following him down to his favorite cafe each morning, ordering coffee, sharpening pencils, and pulling out a notebook to get to work on the next story. A Moveable Feast is the closest thing we have to travelling back in time to one of those wind-swept Paris mornings, sitting at an adjoining table near the warm stove in the dusty, slanting sun, and watching Hemingway work.

Although the entire book is a delight, my absolute favorite section is where the author recounts an ill-advised trip he takes with F. Scott Fitzgerald to retrieve the automobile Scott and Zelda abandoned on their way into Paris one Spring. I will not divulge any spoilers, but suffice it to say that Zelda had the top of the car cut off (she hated tops on cars), it was a very rainy Spring, and Scott Fitzgerald was a notorious hypochondriac with only Hemingway to take care of him. This episode is absolutely priceless, and I am amazed that a film has not yet been made out of it.

I have never read another book which conveys the reader so effectively to Paris "in the early days when we were very poor and very happy." A Moveable Feast is an absolute classic. Highly recommended.

A MOVEABLE FEAST: THE RESTORED EDITION by Ernest Hemingway.

A memoir - similar to a diary. Hemingway writes about 30 different experiences he had during the 1920s. Most were set in Paris, France, where he lived with his wife Hadley. Examples: his visits with Gertrude Stein, betting on horse racing, a trip he made with F. Scott Fitzgerald, a ski trip he made with his wife. I was sad thinking about the poverty he and his wife lived through. Sometimes he went hungry. He said he and his wife were in love and happy during that time. I was concerned about all the alcohol drinking by Hemingway and others. He said it did not interfere with his work, but I wondered.

I was sad that Scott's wife Zelda sabotaged Scott's writing, frequently interrupting him, and tempting him to drink. She was jealous of his writing.

I liked Hemingway's comment about Ford Madox Hueffer and lying. "Almost everyone lies and the lies are not important. Some people we loved for their lies and would wait hopefully for them to start their best ones. Ford though lied about things that left scars. He lied about money and about things that were important in daily living that he would give you his word on."

I would have preferred a biography written by someone researching Hemingway's life - using these memoirs as a source but confirming them with other sources. Hemingway wrote several introductions for this book which appear in the last chapter. In all of them he begins "This is fiction." I think he did that to avoid or reduce lawsuits since he was writing about people he knew. That troubled me. I'd prefer knowing this was factual, not made up. But it sounded factual because it didn't have things that fiction usually has. One interesting chapter was about loving two women at the same time, which ended with his divorce from Hadley and marrying Pauline. He had great remorse over this, and he believed Hadley had a good life through marrying another man later.

A negative: this was unfinished. It was published after his death by relatives. The first publishers eliminated some sections. The second publishers included more. I regret that Hemingway was not able to edit and rewrite his own words.

Apparently the print version has pictures which I did not see, since I did the audiobook.

The narrator John Bedford Lloyd was fine.

DATA:
Unabridged audiobook reading time: 6 hrs and 42 mins. Swearing language: mild. Sexual content: A couple instances were referred to without details. Setting: mostly 1920s in Paris, France. Copyright: 1964. Genre: memoirs.

I cannot comment on this version vs. the original (as I haven't read that), but OMG - the absolute horrendous typography made it torture to read. There were many disjointed paragraph breaks, misspelled words and (what appeared to be) missing words as well. Save yourself the aggravation and find a paper version!

I've wanted to read this book for a very long time, and I finally listened to the audiobook. Maybe I didn't have an understanding of the writers before Hemingway enough to appreciate the spare nature of his prose by comparison.
Frankly, with the exception of the very last story in the book - the one about " pilot fish coming before the rich", I didn't see what all the fuss was about. I guess that makes me a Philistine, but it's my honest opinion. I'm sure it was a great travelogue at the time it was written, for everyone who had the wanderlust but couldn't afford to travel abroad. And the literary luminaries he mentions so casually as part of the expat community taking up residence in Paris in the 20's is quite a list of Who's Who in American literature. Well, I'm glad I read it, but I was disappointed when comparing it to the hype. Ah well...moving on...

OK, I know, haiku have 17 syllables and grasp a single moment located in a particular season. But Time shrinks as the years go by, the past becomes smaller in your mind's eye, years compress into flashes of memory. The older Hemingway, writing in the late '50s, caught many moments, caught the whole tenor of a writer's life in Paris in the mid-1920s. They are much wordier than haiku, but many of the pieces have that jewel-like quality. Did he keep a diary ? I don't know, but he recalled an amazing amount if he didn't. With 405 already-existing reviews, I doubt if I can add anything very significant here. Let me just say that these stories capture life in Europe before the world became globalized, homogenized. They tell of the sequestered life of the expats, who definitely mixed more with each other than with their French hosts. Hemingway's machismo comes out in his constant search for "manly" activities---boxing, drinking, horse racing, drinking, skiing, drinking and what have I left out ?....oh, yeah, drinking. Hemingway leaves us portraits of several of the other famous figures of those days---F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. None of them are especially complimentary, but that may say more about the author than about the people. I would say that these portraits have been accepted into the canon, willy-nilly. You learn how Hemingway worked and what he thought about the process of writing. Whether or not Paris was wonderful depends upon your point of view. Like all big cities it had (and has) its high and low points. In any case, it's beautiful writing by one of the greats, beautiful moments in a lost time, a lost city, and the famous 'lost generation'. That's history and that's Life.

I see from all the one-star reviews that there is considerable controversy regarding this new edition, which claims to restore the book to Hemingway's original version. I know nothing about any of that. I am simply reviewing this book as someone who read it without knowing any of the back story.

This book is, simply, a classic. It is wonderful for so many reasons. Painting a portrait of 1920's Paris. Telling stories about then-famous, now-famous, and not-so-famous people. Showcasing Hemingway's writing as a young man. A great social history from a great (or, if not great, then legendary) writer.

It is also fun because, though later revised, Hemingway wrote it as a journal, so it is far less formal and cut-to-the-bone stylized than his novels. His real and relaxed voice is easier to hear.

I can't believe I hadn't read this book before now. If you have any interest in a writer's 1920's Paris, read this book immediately!

Not being a Hemmingway fan, I was surprised at how much I liked it. However, there have been so many editors of this manuscript and scribbled thoughts found after his death, that it is difficult to believe that it true, but it is Hemmingway's true. I read it again to pay more attention to his treatment of Hadley, his first wife who was so conspicuously left out of one of his most famous novels ( this is documented in other biographies).
It seems like Hemingway was looking for forgiveness, absolution and to show remorse, for the things he did to achieve his fame. Is it believable, yes and no, but only Hemmingway knew the reasons. He is so squiggly on F Scott Fitzgerald; his descriptions describe what seems to be a love/hate confusion. However, his genuine, sincere swan song to Hadley, made it worthwhile reading. I believed him, I certainly hope that she did too.

This is a delicious feast. When I read this book I can only read about one or two of the short chapters at a time it is so rich, and the words so enjoyable. You almost taste the words and sometimes that gets in the way of your following the story. I am rereading this book now perhaps for the third time. I rarely do that. This book provides insight into many aspects of Hemingway.

The first interesting thing of note is he writes about his process of writing. As a writer myself it is interesting to learn how others approach the craft. For example, he wrote with a pad of paper, pencils, and a pencil sharpener. He was poor at the time, living in Paris, and thought that sharpening a pencil with a knife was too wasteful. He also talks about how he would write early in the morning at home or at a local cafe. I had forgotten about the incident where his wife at the time left a suitcase full of manuscripts and carbon copies in a cab and they all turned up missing. That incident is mentioned in this book as well but somewhat obliquely. Those early works have never been recovered.

The second interesting thing is when he writes about other literary figures of the time. He is very sympathetic to Ezra Pound, seems to have had some kind of falling out with Gertrud Stein, and seems to have loathed Ford Madox Ford. By the way, I recommend The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford which is a somewhat forgotten classic. At times Hemingway could be beastly when dealing with other people and he certainly shows that side of himself in this book.

I learned to love Hemingway because of my high school English teacher. I still love him. A complex and flawed person, as we all are, but a writer of exquisite talent when he was on his game.

I wish that I could give this book a better review. "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway was recommended to me by a close family member and I have heard much praise about it from others as well. Unfortunately the good words of others were not enough to make reading this book enjoyable.

This book is less interesting and the characters less vivid than in his novels and short stories. "A Moveable Feast" is a collection of memoirs from Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920's. He tells stories of his interactions with people from this time, including Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. There is nothing that binds these vignettes together; each section moves jarringly into the next and after being described, many of the characters are dropped from the remainder of the memoirs.

Hemingway uses considerable space to discuss his experience as a writer. The difficulty of starting to write, the need for silence, and the benefits of a good drink for his writing are all discussed, but it is all dull and uninspired. I imagine that much of what makes this memoir so appealing to others' is the subconscious thrill of all of the famous characters in the story. But stringing together reminisces of Hemingway's times with other famous writers is much less exciting than actually reading the authors' works.

Although I do enjoy Hemingway's other works, I cannot recommend "A Moveable Feast". In its place I recommend The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (Scribner Classics) and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Ernest Hemingway is not one of my favorite writers, but I certainly do like him. And I loved A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his time spent in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway describes many of the famous artists he associated with, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and James Joyce and Ezra Pound and (though she wasn't really an artist) Sylvia Beach. He also describes his wife Hadley, and their son. This had particular relevance for me because I just recently read The Paris Wife, which was from Hadley Richardson's perspective. Here we have what life was like from Ernest's point of view. He chronicles his writing days, where he would sit and write and eat oranges and then walk along the river, he chronicles the horse races (and one familiar event that appears in The Paris Wife), and he tells of specific incidents.

I read "the restored edition", and I don't really know if it's "the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published." Many reviewers on the store seem to suggest that Sean Hemingway manipulated the work, claiming that Hemingway's fourth wife had changed it. But he's doing the same thing. And really, who can tell what Hemingway himself actually intended? He can't tell us anymore.

I loved the descriptions of Paris in this novel, of its high-life and its low-life, of Ernest and Hadley's poverty, their struggle to get by, and his struggle to create. He describes it all really well, though obviously he is biased. There are chapters about the race tracks, about walking by the river, about various famous figures, and of course, about eating. And eating cheaply, but well.

I think I liked this book more than any of Hemingway's novels (I've read The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls). It was more compelling somehow, and easier to get through. Perhaps I'm just more interested in Hemingway's life than the stuff he writes about. Fishing and wars aren't the most interesting for me, but life in Paris is, with its famous authors and bars and cafes and cheap apartments. Hemingway paints a fascinating portrait of what life was like then for artists and writers.

[...]

For those of you fellow Hemingway fans out there, there is a 90 minute panel discussion of the restored edition of this book on the C-Span Book TV website. The panel features Sean Hemingway, Hemingway's grandson and the one who put together the restored edition, and two writers, Diane Johnson and Adam Gopnik. The moderator is Scott Simon from NPR. In the discussion Sean Hemingway confirmed that these sketches were mostly new essays that his grandfather wrote in his 50's, after the discovery of his notebooks in a trunk in the basement of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. It is not simply the publication of things he had written in his twenties. This is what I thought as the tone of the essays is one of someone looking back on their life with insight and feeling. I loved how he brought Paris alive for me and I actually got out my maps of Paris so I could follow along with him on his walks. I could feel his excitement as he headed out to the cafes for his morning writing and I could feel his hunger as he would pass all the aromatic pastry shops when he didn't have enough money to buy anything.

I read the restored edition first, and then I compared it side by side with the original edition edited by Mary Hemingway. Although I appreciate all the additional information contained in the restored edition, I feel the original is much better as a piece of literature. The original is more cohesive and the overall theme of a young writer in love with his life in Paris comes across better. Hemingway so captures what it must have been like to feel that you could be a great writer and the work that it takes to get there. I feel the ending of the original edition is better and more satisfying, even though it was Mary who selected it from all the various drafts of that Hemingway wrote. The original ending doesn't go into all the remorse Hemingway felt for the ending of his marriage with Hadley, nor how he accepted responsibility for ultimately making the choice to go off with Pauline. In his notes, Hemingway decided to leave this part out as he was planning to write a second memoir that would deal with his life with Pauline and he felt it more properly belonged there.

The restored edition is illuminating just to see Hemingway's process of writing. The exhibits of his manuscipts are remarkable in how clean they are, with minor improvements. It is amazing to see how his thoughts came to him fully formed, and so easily and beautifully expressed. It is so tragic to read his various attempts to write a conclusion to the memoir, that are included at the end of the restored edition. These attempts were all made after he had many sessions of electro-convulsive shock therapy to treat his depression. It is now generally agreed that this was the wrong treatment for a writer who so prized his memory that he claimed was like a "rat trap". He said that as a writer, his memories were all he had, so to lose them was devastating for him. In the end he said he would stand at his desk all day trying to write just one sentence to be the conclustion of A Moveable Feast and he found great difficulty in the effort. What is so sad is that he would tell people he knew what he wanted to say, but he simply could not find the words for it. In his last days, all he wanted to do was to finish this manuscript, so it was particularly discouraging when he found he couldn't do it. People there said it is one of the things that contributed to his suicide.

Regarding the mental and physical decline that Hemingway experienced in his last two years of life, medical records that became available in 1991 show that he was diagnosed with hemochromatosis the year of his death. This is a genetic disease in which the body is unable to metabolize iron. It results in the kind of mental decline that both Hemingway and his father went through. Sadly, Hemingway's father also committed suicide, as did Hemingway's sister Ursula, his brother Leicester, and his granddaughter Margaux.

The last two years of Hemingway's life were plagued by paranoia and delusional obsessions. He felt he was continuously being followed by the FBI and he would accuse innocent people in bars of being FBI agents. He also thought the IRS were after him and he would talk endlessly about it. Since Hemingway was writing some of the chapters of A Moveable Feast during this peiod, it might help to explain the obsessional nature of his purusing 35 year old feuds with Ford Madox Ford, Hal Acton, and Wyndham Lewis, amoung others. Scholars believe that the grudge he held against these people resulted from their putting in print their belief that Hemingway had been influenced in his writing by Gertrude Stein. Even after so many years, Hemingway seemed unable and unwilling to accept the truth of this statement.

If you have become as fascinated as I have been with the life of Hemingway, another book I would recommend is The Hemingway Women by Bernice Kert. Reading it, I grew to admire Hadley all the more. She truly was the humorous, kind, and compassionate woman that Ernest portrayed in this memoir. Hadley had stated that Hemingway was the "prince" who scaled her walls and "rescued" her when she feared she never would marry. They met at a party when Hadley was about 30 and he was 22. At the party, Hemingway "only had eyes for her". At the time Hadley had been through quite a lot as her father had committed suicide and Hadley had nursed her mother through and an illness that then took her life. By all accounts, Hadley blossumed during her marriage, and her new security allowed her sense of humor to come to the fore. Hadley stated that "Hemingway gave me the world". Years later, when her son asked her how she felt about all that had happened, she replied that in the end, "It was all for the best. He (Hemingway) was a bit of a handful. All of his wives had a difficult time with him." Hadley did go on to have a very happy marriage of 30+ years to a man more suited to her. With her characteristic wit, she was quoted as saying "If Ernest had not been brought up in that damned stuffy Oak Park enviornment, he would not have thought that when you fall in love extramaritally you have to get a divorce and marry the girl." Somewhere I read that Hemingway once referred to Pauline as "the rich snake in the Dior suit". It is a tribute to Hadley that she was able to forgive Pauline and actually become friends with her. Their friendship enabled the sons to get to know one another.

This little gem sat on my shelf for many years waiting for me to discover what Hemingway meant when he wrote, "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." And he does in A MOVEABLE FEAST. Written in 1957 and worked upon in the winter of 1958-59, the Master finally finished his revisions to this memoir of his early Paris years when he and Hadley were "very poor and very happy." Before Ernest became the legendary "Papa Hemingway."

He teases us readers that he has left out many places, people, observations and impressions. "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." He clearly wanted to keep some secrets; after all it was his remembrances of his early life before scandal, divorce, THE SUN ALSO RISES. But Hemingway also wanted to clarify some things he felt were unjustly attributed to him.

Hemingway's break from Gertrude Stein is one such thing. I believe that he saw in her a female version of himself as writer. He disapproved of her sexuality, but admired her intellect. He saw that Stein demanded from her friends an absolute support and devotion that left no room for disagreement that she interpreted as disapproval. Ernest Hemingway, even then demanded that from everyone who was close to him. It was painful to read the sketch he chose to include as he remembered the last time he was in her Parisian apartment. And I agree with Hemingway that all generations are lost until they are called to live and do the things that are required of their particular generation.

I also think he was fond of F. Scot Fitzgerald. I didn't think the sketches of this talented genius were acidic. The description of the butterfly is apropos of Fitzgerald. He was talented and a drunkard, chained to a vile but insane Zelda. In Hemingway's mind Scot didn't fulfill his genius. If one is a writer, one must write. Fitzgerald couldn't escape Zelda, and Hemingway couldn't understand Scot's self-destruction until probably later when he couldn't write that true sentence after he received those shock treatments while in the Mayo Clinic weeks before Hemingway committed suicide, the ultimate act of self destruction. But I'm glad this small memoir was published in 1964 posthumously, because "Papa Hemingway" needed an audience for his writing and we get honest, yet beautiful prose that will never be replicated.

This is a collection of stories written by Hemingway recalling his years in Paris in the early 1920's when he was a struggling writer. He recalls being both very poor and very happy at the same time. This was a very different time from now when you could live on much less and the people he relates are not all ego and caught up in how important they are. These people were more focused on being true to what they wanted to be and not worried about success since they felt they could not be a success without being true to themselves first.

It is fascinating to read of him encountering other noteable people and relating them as an equal well at the same time having great respect for how they work compared to his own work. He spends several stories detailing his releationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife. He saw these people at their best and at their worst and is not afraid to detail both.

I would recommend this book to any fan of Hemmingway's work as well as to anyone interested in a glimpse of the ex-patriate American community in Paris of Post World War I. It is very different from anything written in current time and probably could not be written now for fear of libel from the individuals or their estate. If you get a chance, pick up a copy of this book and read one short story and get a glimpse of this world.

My mom had a stroke and can no longer read books. She was always an avid reader and Hemingway was her favorite author. She gave me a copy of this book in 1979, when I was getting on a plane for the first time (destination: Paris). I read the whole book on the plane, and it made my time in Paris so much more meaningful, as I visited all the places mentioned in the novel.

So I decided to surprise my mom with this book on audio CD for Easter. She lives 1200 miles away, so I had it gift wrapped and shipped directly to her. Boy was she ever surprised!

I'm happy to say that this is probably the best gift I've ever given her in 50 years! She's listening to it over and over, and every time I talk to her, she tells me how much she's enjoying it! Score!!!!

There will be more Hemingway on CD in mom's future!

The book offered an interesting and compelling insight into Hemmingway’s psyche; his perception of the world and those around him, his perspective on the various intimate relationships that filled his life (romantic, platonic and mentor/student) and the torments and triumphs of his intense writing process. Yet while the book afforded the reader the luxury of getting to know Hemmingway the man on a more personal level, it oftentimes could not help but feel disjointed as the composite story was comprised of chapters describing separate events and character depictions that have been posthumously cobbled together to form a whole. Absolutely worthwhile reading for the Hemmingway aficionados, but not necessarily a good choice if one desires a cohesive and flowing narrative.

I loved this work. It is an autobiographical work composed by an iconic author near the end of his life, about a much earlier part of his life. it is a truly touching retrospective. As a student of the so called "lost generation" of American artists residing in France between the two world wars, I found this work fascinating as well as extremely illuminating. In addition to talking about his own life, Mr. Hemingway gives insights into the lives of other iconic figures such as Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Getrude Stein. My personal favorite work by Mr. Hemingway is "The Sun Also Rises", which was written when he was a young man. Ironically, it is this work, composed at the end of his life, that is my second favorite work by Mr. Hemingway.

A Moveable Feast is a pleasant journey through the Paris of the Lost Generation in the 1920's with Ernest Hemingway guiding the way. He is deeply in love with his first wife, Hadley and is a struggling writer who spends his days writing in the cafes of the city. He describes Paris one spring:

"With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed."

The Hemingways live in an apartment above a sawmill with their son Bumby and cat, F. Puss. Hemingway first works as a journalist and then tries to earn a living selling short stories, while writing a novel. At the time he crosses paths with other authors and artists as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald. A Moveable Feast is worth a read for the intriguing and amusing chapters about Fitzgerald, but Hemingway has a way of describing all around him that provides a satisfied grin. Of Gertrude Stein he says:

"Finally she even quarreled with the new friends but none of us followed it any more. She got to look like a Roman emperor and that was fine if you liked your women to look like Roman emperors. But Picasso had painted her, and I could remember her when she looked like a woman from Friuli."

Ironically one of the things which I enjoyed most in this book was how ernest his writing seemed. I found it fascinating to read about his writing process, how he wanted it stripped down of the extraneous and how he would rewrite until he was able to accomplish that.

I would expect that Hemingway perhaps romanticized this time a bit as it was written some forty years after the fact, but still I found it well worth the read.

One comes away from reading Hemingway's last efforts (all of which were published posthumously) feeling that he cut himself short of true greatness by taking his own life in his early 60's (1961). Novels like "A Moveable Feast" and "Islands in the Stream" show that his writing prowess was- contrary to popular belife- growing when he was in his later years- and comparisons of these later works with ones like "The Sun Also Rises" show a writer whose strength had not yet crested. The weaknesses and flaws of "The Sun Also Rises" are by his later years replaced with much more depth and insights into the human character, which are evident in this work.

In "A Moveable Feast", Hemingway takes a fond look back at his early years in and around Paris, when he was a struggling writer, with little money, newly married and nowhere to go but up. He recalls the tough times with pleasure- remembering that he often had nothing to eat and even went to the park to catch pigeons for dinner. These recollections are interesting, as many people who had roughly similar experiences would likely want to forget them- not re-live them. Yet, Hemingway does and it is a moving tribute to the circumstances, places and people which gave rise to one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. In the novel, he makes the famous quote, which became the title of the book: "If you were lucky enough to be in Paris as a young man, it will stay with you forever, for Paris is a moveable feast..." People who have never visited Paris will feel as if they're walking the back streets, sitting with him in the small cafes, sipping coffee and watching the crowds go by... and this remembrance is touching while it is inspirational. Any young writer who is now trying to make it in the world should take heart- savor the "good old days" - because they are some of your best...

-Gene Pisasale
Author of "Lafayette's Gold- The Lost Brandywine Treasure" and
"Vineyard Days"

If you were serious about your creativity in the 1920's, Paris was the place to be. There was a large community of American ex-pats living there, many of them writers who would become renowned throughout the world. Ernest Hemingway was just a beginner then, but a promising one, and, surrounded by such prominent writers as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he learned to be first-rate. With his first wife, Hadley, and in time, baby son Bumby (John), Hemingway was living a dream, a very Bohemian, romantic dream. Within a few years, of course, the marriage would shatter, and Hemingway would move on to take his place in the center of the literary stage. In A Moveable Feast, written in the early 1960's, he compiled a series of essays into memoir form describing the joys of being poor and of having work that he loved.

The Hemingways were poor in a genteel sort of way, and with the prodigious daily drinking that went on, it's easy to see why there sometimes remained little money for food. He is known today for his influence of American literature, which was to use real people and situations in all his work and to keep sentences short and "true". Wit, irony, and honesty are pervasive. Essentially, all of Hemingway's fiction was about his own life and self. There are those who believe that, in his only actual memoir, there was also a good deal of fiction, of bending the truth. Perhaps so. But how many writers can convey, in chapters of only a few pages, so much connotative meaning? A Moveable Feast is genuine in its portrayal of a young writer's struggles and loss of innocence, and of a special place and time never to be recovered, literally or figuratively. Paris is "a moveable feast", he said, because once you have lived there when young, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you."

It's easy to see why the Additional Paris Sketches were not included before. They're not very good. It's also easy to see why they are included now. They're still pretty interesting even if they're not very good. The really interesting part, though, is comparing edited stories with restored versions: what was gained or lost or regained.

Usually both versions are good in different ways and it's hard to say which is better.

The Fragments included at the end are quite sad, showing Hemingway's repeated attempts to write an introduction to the book. (The previously published introduction was apparently fabricated by Mary Hemingway, his wife at the time.) Though each attempt contains some spark, all in the end fail miserably.

Though people persist in referring to A Moveable Feast as a memoir, Hemingway clearly considered it a work of fiction, saying: "All remembrance of things past is fiction."

Perhaps it should go without saying that memoir is simply a genre of fiction.

What is remarkable is how much this new version of A Moveable Feast resembles the old. I think it's superior: fuller, richer, probably much closer to the author's intentions. But the writing all seems to have come out of same bin, written at the same time. Maybe there is little difference between the Gertrude Stein chapter of the old version and the new one. But the new one seems awfully sharper and more pointed. In the first redaction, Gertrude was generous, opinionated and pathetic. Here she's a shallow boor without much to recommend her other than her famous connections, and Hemingway frankly concedes he is sucking up to her to help his career.

There is more on Scott Fitzgerald, and some of it is devastating, but it gives us a much more rounded picture of the relationship of the two men: Fitzgerald was as dependent on Hemingway's approval as Hemingway was resentful of having to be grateful to Scott for jump-starting his career. Ford Madox Ford's reputation will never survive the treatment in this version, even though Hemingway portrayed him pleasantly enough (as Braddocks) in 'The Sun Also Rises,' aka Fiesta. The end-of-book business about the pilot fish who came and wrecked Hemingway's first marriage: this is elaborated much more touchingly here than in the first version of these stories.

No doubt about it, this is a messier volume than the tidy version that Mary Welsh Hemingway prepared forty-odd years ago. But it feels more genuine, more like a recovery of old manuscripts from an old trunk, and it's a messiness I like.

In 1961, Ernest Hemingway took his own life just as his father had many years before. A Moveable Feast is a book of memoirs he worked on between 1957 and 1960 right before he lost his battle with mental illness. It contains selected memories of the author's time spent in Paris in the early to mid 1920s. A time when he was poor but happy. A time when the artistic stimulation of the city and the closeness he shared with his wife and child made him feel as though he were the luckiest man on earth. Despite his subsequent fame, wealth and critical acclaim, he would never again enjoy the kind of unbridled happiness and personal satisfaction he experienced during those early years.

Each of A Moveable Feast's highly readable chapters can be viewed as a stand alone essay about the people, places and activities which together defined Hemingway's life during those years. The common thread which links each chapter with the others is the palpable affection the author held for that long ago time in his life. One gets the distinct impression Hemingway would have happily given up all worldly possessions, including his reputation as a literary legend for the chance to relive that magical time, if only for one day. A Moveable Feast is written from the heart and is devoid of phoniness. Highly recommended.

There are many flaws in this "restoration" most of which have been pointed out by critics and reviewers. Two major considerations drive this comment:

A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

1. Hemingway's last months, when he is purported to have arranged the restored version that is put forth in this 2009 edition, were filled with physical and mental illnesses such that his decision making was untrustworthy. His critical and literary faculties especially were weakened and led to torturous and repetitive arranging, rearranging and revising and the results were often a diminished text even by Hemingway's then cloudy perception. To argue that one of these arrangements should be given priority has no basis in fact or aesthetics.

2. The so-called restored text is far weaker by any measure than the text put together by Mary Hemingway with the close participation of others. Nothing I know of Hemingway was put in question by the contents and (slight) revisions of the prose crafted by this team. True, they occasionally selected earlier castings of a few episodes, most dealing with Hadley and Pauline Pfeiffer but it is evident even from the restored version that Hemingway was floundering during this period in his attempts to do justice to these two women. The restored version presents one version; the earlier book another.

That last point leads to a furter point: there is some value to the restored version, not as a remaking of A Movable Feast, but in providing some valuable ancillary material that sheds light on the making of the original manuscript prior to Hemingway's death. Even here there is some cause for complaint: some of the material might better have been left in the archives rather than being dragged before the public under the guise of righting a wrong.

Published posthumously, this memoir is a series of sketches recounting episodes from Hemingway's life in Paris in the early 1920s. It is probably the best thing Hemingway wrote in his late years. This is the period when Hemingway perfected his laconic style and produced several of the short stories that form his most durable work. Many of the sketches display the economy of style and eye for telling detail found in Hemingway's best short stories. Much of the book is devoted to describing his life as a young writer trying to perfect his style. It contains interesting, though not necessarily objective, portraits of Hemingway's friends Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The presiding spirit of this book is Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson Hemingway.

This book has a more than wistful quality because of the circumstances under which it was written. Hemingway produced it in the late 1950s when he was struggling with his alcoholism, bouts of depression, and not very successful attempts to produce major novels. The contrast with the vigor, productivity, and happiness of this Parisian period must have been painful for Hemingway though only at the very end of book does a note of self-pity creep in.

Some of Hemingway's books were/are brilliant, but this is not one of them. I was sixteen when Old Man and the Sea was published (yes, I'm very old) and even at that age, inexperienced and naive about things literary, I thought his style affected and self-conscious. A Moveable Feast suffers from the same defect. Maybe this won't bother you. I also found some of the stories pointless and uninteresting, and the constant mention of what sort of liquor he was drinking (I really don't care), while at the same time inferring that other people were alcoholics, was tiresome.

This was my first Hemingway. I was expecting short stories from his time in Paris but what I found was an old friend sharing stories, personal experiences and secrets of his life and writing technique. The two last chapters are touching for their honesty and his open heart. Five stars for him and the work done here.

BUT the edition's poor bound reminds me of when he asks a french woman how she recognizes a quality book and the first thing she says is that american books have poor bounding. Here they used only glue. And poor glue for a book this size. Pages/blocks of pages fall, you become afraid of opening the book too much as you see the pages start to leave the glue, it became a bizarre experience. Specially after reading two books from Penguin's amazing Leather Bound Deluxe edition... Zero, or nada, for the extremelly poor work done here. The book looks solid and respectable but actually the french woman had a strong point.

As a result, I'll have to have my restored edition restored. That's why I suggest the editors change its name for A Moveable Feast: The Restorable Edition.

But the text saves both the poor bound and bizarre experience.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is his only nonfiction work and his first to be published posthumously. A Moveable Feast covers Hemingway's first extended time in Paris in the 20's, as he lives in a cheap apartment with his wife and son, spending his days writing in cafes and socializing with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. It even includes a wild trip to Lyons with Scott Fitzgerald.

Written in the romanticized style of this time period you'll want to hop the next flight to Paris so that you too can live in the moment. Hemingway captures the feeling of Paris in the 1920's perfectly. The carefree life of an artist or writer is enviable. The ease in which they fit into a foreign world, make friends with one another, feed and learn off of one another is truly unique. This book moves at a slow pace, mimicking the lifestyle they lived, and is also very broken, living in the moment much like these artists did. It is particularly interesting to see Hemingway, a literary giant of today, humbled as he struggles to write, never believing he'll be able to write a full novel like Scott Fitzgerald. This is a book you will escape in.

I read this book while living in Paris. From reading other works by Hemingway, I realized that A Moveable Feast isn't as sophisticated as his novels. He writes as if in a stream of thought rather than being descriptive and evoking, so it was disappointing in that respect. Also, the novel, somewhat, lacks flow, but this could be so because of its posthumous publication. This doesn't hamper the ability to understand the novel in anyway, so it's a take it or leave it situation.
The two things that I enjoyed most about A Moveable Feast was its adherence to places and people found in Paris during the twenties and, if you are fascinated by such writers as Gertrude Stein or F. Scott Fitzgerald or just writers in general, this is definitely a key text to learning more about the personalities of these writers...through Hemingway's eyes, of course, but always interested, insightful, and sometimes hilarious in a quirky way. What also impressed me about this book is the personal insight into Hemingway's own life--how he lived, how he felt, what kind of person he was. He describes several scenarios involving his wife and other writers that portray who Hemingway was as a person. Also, since this was written shortly before his suicide, it is possible to see a sort of descent in Hemingway's mood as he closes the novel, which adds a moving and sorrowful end to the novel. Considering these elements, I think A Moveable Feast is definitely worth reading, particularly if one is staying in Paris. (Hemingway mentions the adresses--most of which are still intact in Paris--of other famous writers as well as places, such as the Closerie de Lilas, where he ate, drank, and "shopped.") It can serve as a mini-guidebook for those interested in expatriate writers.

This book about Ernest Hemingway is about his life in Paris during the memorable lost generation of writers. I have one hangup about him not writing enough about a close friend, journalist, and fellow writer, Janet "Genet" Flanner from the New Yorker. All he wrote was one sentence. He writes lovingly about Gertrude Stein and leaves out the name of her partner/companion Alice B. Toklas. He had a complicated relationship regarding Stein. He also writes about the lesbians, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, a little about Natalie Clifford Barney also known as the the store, and other writers like Ezra Pound. The book is easy to read and is reminiscent about Paris during another time and generation before World War II when America was in the grips of the great depression and writers became expatriates to Paris and Europe much like Hemingway. World War II shattered the lost generation's control of Parisian expatriates like Hemingway, Flanner, Beach, Stein and Toklas. He describes Paris as a moveable feast but you could be poor and happy in Paris while struggling to be a writer. I think it's when Hemingway was the happiest along with the others. The phrase of "all good things come to an end" suits the lost generation of writers like Hemingway. They never found the happiness again.

I've never been a Hemingway fan. His macho heroes and troubled or blase heroines did not quite ring true to me. A Moveable Feast is different. In this book, the young writer is not yet a jaded, iconic figure forced to live up to his image. He lives poor in post-war Paris of the 1920s with his first wife Hadley, haunting the sidewalk cafes and soaking in the ambience with refreshing honesty and innocence. He admires and sometimes envies ex patriate writers his work is destined to overshadow in the future.

I did not feel that Hemingway trashed his literary friends in Paris. He made allowances for their quirks and foibles and accepted them as they were. Small hints of the dark depressions he suffered later in life are revealed, but for the most part, the young Hemingway in Paris is hopeful and happier than any other time in his life.

How poignant to me that Hemingway wrote this book near the end of his life, a life ended at his own hand. He memorialized the happy, hopeful times, looked back from fame to a simpler era. Before dying, he remembers youthful joy and Paris as it was. Because he shared himself with honesty, this book is exceptional in my view.

This posthumously published short book is a memoir of Ernest Hemingway's Paris years in the mid 1920's. It is written as a series of brief vignettes with real names. Hemingway looks back, writing in the late 1950's in Cuba to the days in Paris when he was poor, young and happy. Hemingway describes coming to Paris from America in the early 1920's and meeting some of the literary expatriates of the Left Bank. He describes his friendship with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford. He recalls a rainy road trip taken across France with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He joins Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company lending library and takes vacations to Italy, Austria and Spain. He works as a journalist for the Toronto Star while writing short stories and seeking to make a name for himself as a writer. He describes his discovery of and passion for bullfighting. He publishes collections of short stories and begins work on his first real novel.
Hemingway's Paris days are spent sitting in cafes. He takes the act of writing seriously and sets out rules to keep his mind clear and prevent writer's block. He takes delight in discovering Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore selling English language books. He has plenty of time to go sightseeing with his first wife Hadley during those years in Paris when they were "poor and happy."
There is palpable sense of the older Hemingway looking back nostalgically on the good old days. He speaks frankly of his old friends, pulling no punches even to the point of portraying them quite unflatteringly. Most interesting of all is his ritualized approach to writing. He writes only in the morning, usually alone in a small room he has rented just for that purpose. He forces himself to stop while his story is still unfolding in his mind so that he will have something to write about the next day. He makes a point of reading books, visiting museums and especially observing Parisians going about their daily business. These things he incorporates into his writing.
This is not a novel in the traditional sense, nor is it a rigidly chronologically ordered memoir. The starting and ending points of the vignettes are not specifically defined. I would recommend that anyone who reads this follow up by reading Michael Reynolds's "Hemingway, The Paris Years." The timeframe of the two books almost perfectly coincides and Reynolds's book will give you a perspective on the things Hemingway leaves unsaid.
The final chapter in which Hemingway places the blame for the break-up of his first marriage to Hadley on his second wife Pauline Pfeifer, while not taking any responsibility for his unfaithfulness, is almost bizarre to read. Since this book was published after his death, it is surprising to me that his children by Pauline did not wish to see it suppressed. Pauline is portrayed as a husband stealing, back stabber single mindedly luring an unwilling Hemingway away from his loving gullible wife and young child.

The title `A Moveable Feast' in its brevity tells a lot and is a good example of Hemingway's tight writing style. Hemingway exacted severe discipline upon himself regarding his work, and he set a goal to write one story about each thing that he knew about. An important lesson he learned about writing was to not think about anything that he was writing from the time he stopped writing one day until he started again the next. That way the subconscious mind could be working on it and at the same time he'd be listening to other people, and noticing everything. He spent many hours at the Louvre studying the works of Cézanne, Monet and Manet as a way to feed his imagination. He had no close friends in Paris during those years although he had on and off relationships with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
One of the most traumatic times of his life, regarding his work, happened when his wife Hadley lost a suitcase containing all of his manuscripts, with the exception of two short stories, `My Old Man' and `Up in Michigan.' The suitcase was never found and one can only imagine the empty feeling he must have felt at the time.
In `A Moveable Feast' Hemingway draws a vivid word picture of Paris that only he could have drawn. Read this book and let Hemingway guide you through the Paris he knew in the 1920's
Tom Barnes Author `Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone,' `The Goring Collection,' `The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.'

Hemingway's classic lucid and laconic trademark writing style is indeed fully alive and well in the posthumously published A Moveable Feast. A Moveable Feast, the unique term used to describe Paris of the 1920's, reads like The Sun Also Rises - with great dialogue and characters. In fact, in the preface, Hemingway states, "If the reader prefers, this may be regarded as fiction."
Hemingway admits to leaving out some details and happenings - some that were widely known and others that were "secrets". That being said, Hem(as he is affectionately called - seeing as he loathes Ernest) nonetheless emits a plethora of juicy details and tidbits that make A Moveable Feast a compelling and delightful novella - even if it is nonfiction.
Hemingway runs the entire gamut(a word F. Scott uses much to Hem's displeasure) with his eclectic cast of expatriates including the virtually blind James Joyce, the alcoholic genius hypochondriac that is F. Scott Fitzgerald, the influential & eccentric Gertrude Stein, the elitist Ford Maddox Ford, the bel esprit of Ezra Pound, the selfish, insane, and terribly jealous Zelda Fitzgerald, a fellow who he profanely derides named Hal whom I suspect is Henry Miller and many, many more. By the way, we learn that La Generation Perdue inadvertently was coined by a garage mechanic of Gertrude Stein, not Gertrude herself. An indescribable feeling of vibrancy, vigor, and passion emanate from A Moveable Feast as Hemingway, despite being poor, inherently loves his life, writing, sipping his cafe de cremes and white wines in Paris cafes, as well as his continuously changing circle of friends. I highly recommend this short, yet unforgettable work, to all who want to learn what it truly was like when Hemingway was poor and unestablished living check to check - and nonetheless exerting an invigorating joie de vivre. Paris in the 20's - a time and place magically unlike any other in history.
"It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." - Hemingway.

I was rather excited to read a non-fiction book by Hemingway about his time in Paris, where some great writers lived at the time. This was quite the disappointment. "A Moveable Feast" can be viewed as random chapters about a few experiences Hemingway had in France. For the most part, I had no interest in them. The only chapters which I found to be fascinating were the last three concerning his friendship with Fitzgerald. I don't know much about Fitzgerald's life, but Hemingway portrays him as quite a character.

This is Hemingway's nostalgia trip for the world that was when he wrote 'The Sun Also Rises'. The Paris of post- World War One time with his wife Hadley, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Joyce, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. Hemingway is great at giving the feeling and spirit of the time, of youth embracing life at the fullest. At the same time Hemingway is petty and bitter and describes old friends, and people who helped him, Stein and the Fitzgeralds in a particularly nasty way. I suppose that was his way of showing that he could beat old Scott the same way he beat old Turgenev.

Nonetheless,the distinctive Hemingway style, the great beauty of his concision is here in many of these sentences.

I think he misled a lot of young Americans who came to Paris at some point looking for something similar to what he found, and never found it. He said, "'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.'

But behind this of course at the edge of Hemingway in all his best writing is the threat of the Nada, the Nada which eventually got him. But not before he gave us another fine gift with this work.

In the 1920s when writer Ernest Hemingway lived in Paris with his wife and child they were so poor that he had no money to join the of Shakespeare & Co's rental library. Nevertheless, the bookstore owner Sylvia Beach let him join and told he could pay whenever he was able to afford it. In his memoirs posthumously published "A Moveable Feast", the great writer says she had no reason to thrust him. His first choices were Russian writers -- Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky -- and D. H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers". These were the first of many.

The episode involving Sylvia Beach and her famous bookstore/library is just one small drop in the ocean of torrential memories narrated by Hemingway of his young days in Paris. More than a recount of a period of the writer's life, "A Moveable Feast" is a portray of a time, a place and a generation. The "Génération Perdeu", as writer Gertrude Stein, named Hemingway and some other expatriated writers in Paris.

Readers shouldn't approach it expecting a report. It is a book of memoirs, an autobiography, therefore the facts and people are seeing through Hemingway's filter. It a juicy account of what he saw through his eyes. Was F. Scott Fitzgerald as problematic and negligent as he is described? It depends on who is describing him. In "A Moveable Feast" he is a tormented person, who is able to forget a trip with a friend. Was it a pattern in the behavior creator of Gatsby? It doesn't matter. Here what counts were the moments. And those days were wild.

Hemingway writes non-fiction with same assurance he produced fiction. Real people -- Beach, Stein, Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound among others -- emerge so detailed and colorful that one may wonders if they were so interesting as described. It is very likely so, but the authors words are so powerful that readers may forget this fact -- not fiction.

Contemporary readers could never visit that old Paris, a place where veteran writers gave aspirant ones advices in a café. We are lucky that we will always have Hemingway's Paris. One can never more go there and meet those people and places, but any reader can go back to this amazing book and meet those brilliant minds as many time as he/she wants. Like Hemingway says at some point, in those days they didn't trust any one who hadn't been in war, but actually they didn't completely trust anyone. This should be the same behavior expected of reader. Do not trust anyone, only those who were in loco. And not only was Hemingway in loco, he lived and experienced Paris in those days when he were poor but (or should we say `and'?) happy.

"A Moveable Feast" is like a Literary Tabloid page. In it the reader learns about F. Scott Fitzgerald's small penis, Gertrude Stein's weird relationship with her lesbian lover, and of the generosity of Ezra Pound. This makes for a book that is interesting, but reflects poorly on Hemingway (even if he never published it himself-- he still wrote it), as the people he disses are many of the same people who helped him rise to fame and who, at the publication of the book were mostly dead and unable to defend themselves against Hemingway's less than kind portrayals. In the end Hemingway is the one who comes off looking the worst: severely homophobic, arrogant, and ungrateful.

A Moveable Feast consists of several short stories loosely based on Hemingway's time spent living in Paris and traveling in Europe. His wife Hadley and son "Bumby" make appearances here, as does second wife Pauline (albeit very briefly). Also showing up in these pages are some from the famous Paris "scene" of the time, such as Ezra Pound, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.

Although the Hemingways personal life was interesting also, what I really enjoyed about this book was the glimpse into the other writers' lives, and Hemingways portrayals of them. Not sure how accurate it actually is, but his comments about Ford Madox Ford are hilarious, if cruel. It's very obvious Hemingway did not care for the man. Equally entertaining are his stories about the Fitzgeralds, in particular a trip he takes with Scott to pick up a car. In all, I very much enjoyed this look into a time now past; and all the main players now dead.

Hemmingway describes the people he cavorted with in France during the 1920's as Vonnegut portrays fantastic characters in his novels. The prose tells the idiosyncratic tales and eccentricities of writers making their way, or trying to make their way, on the streets of Paris after World War I. I enjoyed the book immensely, especially as it provided insight into the lives of many writers whom I had previously read, but never read about. Hemmingway describes reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gadsby when it was first published. He tells of his relationship with Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. He writes about visiting Gertrude Stein and others in his younger days in Paris. Hemmingway's vivid portrayal of many of the `20s most famous personalities has given me renewed interest to read their works, and his. I look forward to rereading The Sun Also Rises and other works of literary greatness.
He also writes about what it is like to be a writer. Holding counsel with Fitzgerald and others, Hemmingway provides a snapshot into his discipline. This work presents great insight into the life of a truly great author.

What a fine book. The remembrance of Papa Hemingway of the time when he was simply Hem. The work is sparse. Certainly, many of the details are intentionally ommitted. In many ways A Moveable Feast is a big tease. Just like Hemingway's best short stories.
Hemingway gives the reader the gift of a small insight into the life of a young artist in 1920s Paris. We see Hemingway hard at work writing in the cafes; hard at play flirting with painters' models; at home loving his young wife; at the foot of the looming Gertrude Stein. Hemingway also sketches his thoughts on Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Pound, and Fitzgerald. Lots of kernals--nothing fully flushed out. That's why it works, I think.
If Hemingway sat down and wrote a full memior, I am sure the reader eventually would fly away screaming, "enough is enough, you big gasbag." But Hemingway knew that his best work left the reader wanting more, left the mystery intact. We only get a glimpse of Hemingway which does not begin to explain his complex self-destructive personality--but it is a glimpse of genius, which, in this case, is enough.

Man...this book was...wow...not at all what I expected. I picked it up for a few cents at a used book store, intrigued by the description of it as "the wild young years of the lost generation in paris". Frankly I was thinking that it was probably going to be something akin to The Sun Also Rises, one of my favorite novels. But wow was I mistaken. Instead it is a memoir of 5 years of Hemingway's life in paris. These are the pre-Sun Also Rises and international fame years. He's a starving artist, living with his wife, Hadley, in the romantic, bohemian Left Bank of Paris. We are treated, and treated is the only word I can use, to many anecdotes of his life writing and socializing with his fellow expatriates. Hemingway gives us amazing portraits of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford (one of the most hilarious characters in his real life story), and, above all in my opinion, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Any literature buff will be in ectasy unimaginable by anyone else. There's an ancedote towards the end of the memoir where Scott Fitzgerald tells Hemingway that Zelda was complaing about his..er..'size'. To convince him that Zelda is just being difficult, Hemingway takes Fitzgerald to the Louvre to see the nudes. You just don't get that anywhere else....

After reading the first chapter or two of this memoir, I decided that I needed to savor it. In this book, Hemingway recounts some of his experiences living in Paris in the 1920s. Everytime I opened this book, I was transported there.

I found it most enjoyable to read when I was around town, in coffee shops, on a park bench, etc. There is something about reading Hemmingway's happy, poor man's view of Paris that made me want to be out and about, experiencing a different ambiance than the familiarity of home.

This book has quick chapters that jump a bit from person to person, activity to activity. Though some of the subject matter seems a bit scattered, the entire text feels real and it's easy to loose yourself in the time-period and location. I really enjoyed getting a feel for Hemmingway's writing process, and I loved his descriptions of food at the bars, cafes and restaurants he spent time in.

This is a book I will keep and read again and again.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is his only nonfiction work and his first to be published posthumously. A Moveable Feast covers Hemingway's first extended time in Paris in the 20's, as he lives in a cheap apartment with his wife and son, spending his days writing in cafes and socializing with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. It even includes a wild trip to Lyons with Scott Fitzgerald.

Written in the romanticized style of this time period you'll want to hop the next flight to Paris so that you too can live in the moment. Hemingway captures the feeling of Paris in the 1920's perfectly. The carefree life of an artist or writer is enviable. The ease in which they fit into a foreign world, make friends with one another, feed and learn off of one another is truly unique. This book moves at a slow pace, mimicking the lifestyle they lived, and is also very broken, living in the moment much like these artists did. It is particularly interesting to see Hemingway, a literary giant of today, humbled as he struggles to write, never believing he'll be able to write a full novel like Scott Fitzgerald. This is a book you will escape in.

I read this book while living in Paris. From reading other works by Hemingway, I realized that A Moveable Feast isn't as sophisticated as his novels. He writes as if in a stream of thought rather than being descriptive and evoking, so it was disappointing in that respect. Also, the novel, somewhat, lacks flow, but this could be so because of its posthumous publication. This doesn't hamper the ability to understand the novel in anyway, so it's a take it or leave it situation.
The two things that I enjoyed most about A Moveable Feast was its adherence to places and people found in Paris during the twenties and, if you are fascinated by such writers as Gertrude Stein or F. Scott Fitzgerald or just writers in general, this is definitely a key text to learning more about the personalities of these writers...through Hemingway's eyes, of course, but always interested, insightful, and sometimes hilarious in a quirky way. What also impressed me about this book is the personal insight into Hemingway's own life--how he lived, how he felt, what kind of person he was. He describes several scenarios involving his wife and other writers that portray who Hemingway was as a person. Also, since this was written shortly before his suicide, it is possible to see a sort of descent in Hemingway's mood as he closes the novel, which adds a moving and sorrowful end to the novel. Considering these elements, I think A Moveable Feast is definitely worth reading, particularly if one is staying in Paris. (Hemingway mentions the adresses--most of which are still intact in Paris--of other famous writers as well as places, such as the Closerie de Lilas, where he ate, drank, and "shopped.") It can serve as a mini-guidebook for those interested in expatriate writers.

This book about Ernest Hemingway is about his life in Paris during the memorable lost generation of writers. I have one hangup about him not writing enough about a close friend, journalist, and fellow writer, Janet "Genet" Flanner from the New Yorker. All he wrote was one sentence. He writes lovingly about Gertrude Stein and leaves out the name of her partner/companion Alice B. Toklas. He had a complicated relationship regarding Stein. He also writes about the lesbians, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, a little about Natalie Clifford Barney also known as the the store, and other writers like Ezra Pound. The book is easy to read and is reminiscent about Paris during another time and generation before World War II when America was in the grips of the great depression and writers became expatriates to Paris and Europe much like Hemingway. World War II shattered the lost generation's control of Parisian expatriates like Hemingway, Flanner, Beach, Stein and Toklas. He describes Paris as a moveable feast but you could be poor and happy in Paris while struggling to be a writer. I think it's when Hemingway was the happiest along with the others. The phrase of "all good things come to an end" suits the lost generation of writers like Hemingway. They never found the happiness again.

I've never been a Hemingway fan. His macho heroes and troubled or blase heroines did not quite ring true to me. A Moveable Feast is different. In this book, the young writer is not yet a jaded, iconic figure forced to live up to his image. He lives poor in post-war Paris of the 1920s with his first wife Hadley, haunting the sidewalk cafes and soaking in the ambience with refreshing honesty and innocence. He admires and sometimes envies ex patriate writers his work is destined to overshadow in the future.

I did not feel that Hemingway trashed his literary friends in Paris. He made allowances for their quirks and foibles and accepted them as they were. Small hints of the dark depressions he suffered later in life are revealed, but for the most part, the young Hemingway in Paris is hopeful and happier than any other time in his life.

How poignant to me that Hemingway wrote this book near the end of his life, a life ended at his own hand. He memorialized the happy, hopeful times, looked back from fame to a simpler era. Before dying, he remembers youthful joy and Paris as it was. Because he shared himself with honesty, this book is exceptional in my view.

This posthumously published short book is a memoir of Ernest Hemingway's Paris years in the mid 1920's. It is written as a series of brief vignettes with real names. Hemingway looks back, writing in the late 1950's in Cuba to the days in Paris when he was poor, young and happy. Hemingway describes coming to Paris from America in the early 1920's and meeting some of the literary expatriates of the Left Bank. He describes his friendship with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford. He recalls a rainy road trip taken across France with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He joins Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company lending library and takes vacations to Italy, Austria and Spain. He works as a journalist for the Toronto Star while writing short stories and seeking to make a name for himself as a writer. He describes his discovery of and passion for bullfighting. He publishes collections of short stories and begins work on his first real novel.
Hemingway's Paris days are spent sitting in cafes. He takes the act of writing seriously and sets out rules to keep his mind clear and prevent writer's block. He takes delight in discovering Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore selling English language books. He has plenty of time to go sightseeing with his first wife Hadley during those years in Paris when they were "poor and happy."
There is palpable sense of the older Hemingway looking back nostalgically on the good old days. He speaks frankly of his old friends, pulling no punches even to the point of portraying them quite unflatteringly. Most interesting of all is his ritualized approach to writing. He writes only in the morning, usually alone in a small room he has rented just for that purpose. He forces himself to stop while his story is still unfolding in his mind so that he will have something to write about the next day. He makes a point of reading books, visiting museums and especially observing Parisians going about their daily business. These things he incorporates into his writing.
This is not a novel in the traditional sense, nor is it a rigidly chronologically ordered memoir. The starting and ending points of the vignettes are not specifically defined. I would recommend that anyone who reads this follow up by reading Michael Reynolds's "Hemingway, The Paris Years." The timeframe of the two books almost perfectly coincides and Reynolds's book will give you a perspective on the things Hemingway leaves unsaid.
The final chapter in which Hemingway places the blame for the break-up of his first marriage to Hadley on his second wife Pauline Pfeifer, while not taking any responsibility for his unfaithfulness, is almost bizarre to read. Since this book was published after his death, it is surprising to me that his children by Pauline did not wish to see it suppressed. Pauline is portrayed as a husband stealing, back stabber single mindedly luring an unwilling Hemingway away from his loving gullible wife and young child.

The title `A Moveable Feast' in its brevity tells a lot and is a good example of Hemingway's tight writing style. Hemingway exacted severe discipline upon himself regarding his work, and he set a goal to write one story about each thing that he knew about. An important lesson he learned about writing was to not think about anything that he was writing from the time he stopped writing one day until he started again the next. That way the subconscious mind could be working on it and at the same time he'd be listening to other people, and noticing everything. He spent many hours at the Louvre studying the works of Cézanne, Monet and Manet as a way to feed his imagination. He had no close friends in Paris during those years although he had on and off relationships with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
One of the most traumatic times of his life, regarding his work, happened when his wife Hadley lost a suitcase containing all of his manuscripts, with the exception of two short stories, `My Old Man' and `Up in Michigan.' The suitcase was never found and one can only imagine the empty feeling he must have felt at the time.
In `A Moveable Feast' Hemingway draws a vivid word picture of Paris that only he could have drawn. Read this book and let Hemingway guide you through the Paris he knew in the 1920's
Tom Barnes Author `Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone,' `The Goring Collection,' `The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.'

Hemingway's classic lucid and laconic trademark writing style is indeed fully alive and well in the posthumously published A Moveable Feast. A Moveable Feast, the unique term used to describe Paris of the 1920's, reads like The Sun Also Rises - with great dialogue and characters. In fact, in the preface, Hemingway states, "If the reader prefers, this may be regarded as fiction."
Hemingway admits to leaving out some details and happenings - some that were widely known and others that were "secrets". That being said, Hem(as he is affectionately called - seeing as he loathes Ernest) nonetheless emits a plethora of juicy details and tidbits that make A Moveable Feast a compelling and delightful novella - even if it is nonfiction.
Hemingway runs the entire gamut(a word F. Scott uses much to Hem's displeasure) with his eclectic cast of expatriates including the virtually blind James Joyce, the alcoholic genius hypochondriac that is F. Scott Fitzgerald, the influential & eccentric Gertrude Stein, the elitist Ford Maddox Ford, the bel esprit of Ezra Pound, the selfish, insane, and terribly jealous Zelda Fitzgerald, a fellow who he profanely derides named Hal whom I suspect is Henry Miller and many, many more. By the way, we learn that La Generation Perdue inadvertently was coined by a garage mechanic of Gertrude Stein, not Gertrude herself. An indescribable feeling of vibrancy, vigor, and passion emanate from A Moveable Feast as Hemingway, despite being poor, inherently loves his life, writing, sipping his cafe de cremes and white wines in Paris cafes, as well as his continuously changing circle of friends. I highly recommend this short, yet unforgettable work, to all who want to learn what it truly was like when Hemingway was poor and unestablished living check to check - and nonetheless exerting an invigorating joie de vivre. Paris in the 20's - a time and place magically unlike any other in history.
"It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." - Hemingway.

I was rather excited to read a non-fiction book by Hemingway about his time in Paris, where some great writers lived at the time. This was quite the disappointment. "A Moveable Feast" can be viewed as random chapters about a few experiences Hemingway had in France. For the most part, I had no interest in them. The only chapters which I found to be fascinating were the last three concerning his friendship with Fitzgerald. I don't know much about Fitzgerald's life, but Hemingway portrays him as quite a character.

This is Hemingway's nostalgia trip for the world that was when he wrote 'The Sun Also Rises'. The Paris of post- World War One time with his wife Hadley, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Joyce, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. Hemingway is great at giving the feeling and spirit of the time, of youth embracing life at the fullest. At the same time Hemingway is petty and bitter and describes old friends, and people who helped him, Stein and the Fitzgeralds in a particularly nasty way. I suppose that was his way of showing that he could beat old Scott the same way he beat old Turgenev.

Nonetheless,the distinctive Hemingway style, the great beauty of his concision is here in many of these sentences.

I think he misled a lot of young Americans who came to Paris at some point looking for something similar to what he found, and never found it. He said, "'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.'

But behind this of course at the edge of Hemingway in all his best writing is the threat of the Nada, the Nada which eventually got him. But not before he gave us another fine gift with this work.

In the 1920s when writer Ernest Hemingway lived in Paris with his wife and child they were so poor that he had no money to join the of Shakespeare & Co's rental library. Nevertheless, the bookstore owner Sylvia Beach let him join and told he could pay whenever he was able to afford it. In his memoirs posthumously published "A Moveable Feast", the great writer says she had no reason to thrust him. His first choices were Russian writers -- Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky -- and D. H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers". These were the first of many.

The episode involving Sylvia Beach and her famous bookstore/library is just one small drop in the ocean of torrential memories narrated by Hemingway of his young days in Paris. More than a recount of a period of the writer's life, "A Moveable Feast" is a portray of a time, a place and a generation. The "Génération Perdeu", as writer Gertrude Stein, named Hemingway and some other expatriated writers in Paris.

Readers shouldn't approach it expecting a report. It is a book of memoirs, an autobiography, therefore the facts and people are seeing through Hemingway's filter. It a juicy account of what he saw through his eyes. Was F. Scott Fitzgerald as problematic and negligent as he is described? It depends on who is describing him. In "A Moveable Feast" he is a tormented person, who is able to forget a trip with a friend. Was it a pattern in the behavior creator of Gatsby? It doesn't matter. Here what counts were the moments. And those days were wild.

Hemingway writes non-fiction with same assurance he produced fiction. Real people -- Beach, Stein, Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound among others -- emerge so detailed and colorful that one may wonders if they were so interesting as described. It is very likely so, but the authors words are so powerful that readers may forget this fact -- not fiction.

Contemporary readers could never visit that old Paris, a place where veteran writers gave aspirant ones advices in a café. We are lucky that we will always have Hemingway's Paris. One can never more go there and meet those people and places, but any reader can go back to this amazing book and meet those brilliant minds as many time as he/she wants. Like Hemingway says at some point, in those days they didn't trust any one who hadn't been in war, but actually they didn't completely trust anyone. This should be the same behavior expected of reader. Do not trust anyone, only those who were in loco. And not only was Hemingway in loco, he lived and experienced Paris in those days when he were poor but (or should we say `and'?) happy.

"A Moveable Feast" is like a Literary Tabloid page. In it the reader learns about F. Scott Fitzgerald's small penis, Gertrude Stein's weird relationship with her lesbian lover, and of the generosity of Ezra Pound. This makes for a book that is interesting, but reflects poorly on Hemingway (even if he never published it himself-- he still wrote it), as the people he disses are many of the same people who helped him rise to fame and who, at the publication of the book were mostly dead and unable to defend themselves against Hemingway's less than kind portrayals. In the end Hemingway is the one who comes off looking the worst: severely homophobic, arrogant, and ungrateful.

A Moveable Feast consists of several short stories loosely based on Hemingway's time spent living in Paris and traveling in Europe. His wife Hadley and son "Bumby" make appearances here, as does second wife Pauline (albeit very briefly). Also showing up in these pages are some from the famous Paris "scene" of the time, such as Ezra Pound, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.

Although the Hemingways personal life was interesting also, what I really enjoyed about this book was the glimpse into the other writers' lives, and Hemingways portrayals of them. Not sure how accurate it actually is, but his comments about Ford Madox Ford are hilarious, if cruel. It's very obvious Hemingway did not care for the man. Equally entertaining are his stories about the Fitzgeralds, in particular a trip he takes with Scott to pick up a car. In all, I very much enjoyed this look into a time now past; and all the main players now dead.

Hemmingway describes the people he cavorted with in France during the 1920's as Vonnegut portrays fantastic characters in his novels. The prose tells the idiosyncratic tales and eccentricities of writers making their way, or trying to make their way, on the streets of Paris after World War I. I enjoyed the book immensely, especially as it provided insight into the lives of many writers whom I had previously read, but never read about. Hemmingway describes reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gadsby when it was first published. He tells of his relationship with Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. He writes about visiting Gertrude Stein and others in his younger days in Paris. Hemmingway's vivid portrayal of many of the `20s most famous personalities has given me renewed interest to read their works, and his. I look forward to rereading The Sun Also Rises and other works of literary greatness.
He also writes about what it is like to be a writer. Holding counsel with Fitzgerald and others, Hemmingway provides a snapshot into his discipline. This work presents great insight into the life of a truly great author.

What a fine book. The remembrance of Papa Hemingway of the time when he was simply Hem. The work is sparse. Certainly, many of the details are intentionally ommitted. In many ways A Moveable Feast is a big tease. Just like Hemingway's best short stories.
Hemingway gives the reader the gift of a small insight into the life of a young artist in 1920s Paris. We see Hemingway hard at work writing in the cafes; hard at play flirting with painters' models; at home loving his young wife; at the foot of the looming Gertrude Stein. Hemingway also sketches his thoughts on Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Pound, and Fitzgerald. Lots of kernals--nothing fully flushed out. That's why it works, I think.
If Hemingway sat down and wrote a full memior, I am sure the reader eventually would fly away screaming, "enough is enough, you big gasbag." But Hemingway knew that his best work left the reader wanting more, left the mystery intact. We only get a glimpse of Hemingway which does not begin to explain his complex self-destructive personality--but it is a glimpse of genius, which, in this case, is enough.

Man...this book was...wow...not at all what I expected. I picked it up for a few cents at a used book store, intrigued by the description of it as "the wild young years of the lost generation in paris". Frankly I was thinking that it was probably going to be something akin to The Sun Also Rises, one of my favorite novels. But wow was I mistaken. Instead it is a memoir of 5 years of Hemingway's life in paris. These are the pre-Sun Also Rises and international fame years. He's a starving artist, living with his wife, Hadley, in the romantic, bohemian Left Bank of Paris. We are treated, and treated is the only word I can use, to many anecdotes of his life writing and socializing with his fellow expatriates. Hemingway gives us amazing portraits of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford (one of the most hilarious characters in his real life story), and, above all in my opinion, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Any literature buff will be in ectasy unimaginable by anyone else. There's an ancedote towards the end of the memoir where Scott Fitzgerald tells Hemingway that Zelda was complaing about his..er..'size'. To convince him that Zelda is just being difficult, Hemingway takes Fitzgerald to the Louvre to see the nudes. You just don't get that anywhere else....

After reading the first chapter or two of this memoir, I decided that I needed to savor it. In this book, Hemingway recounts some of his experiences living in Paris in the 1920s. Everytime I opened this book, I was transported there.

I found it most enjoyable to read when I was around town, in coffee shops, on a park bench, etc. There is something about reading Hemmingway's happy, poor man's view of Paris that made me want to be out and about, experiencing a different ambiance than the familiarity of home.

This book has quick chapters that jump a bit from person to person, activity to activity. Though some of the subject matter seems a bit scattered, the entire text feels real and it's easy to loose yourself in the time-period and location. I really enjoyed getting a feel for Hemmingway's writing process, and I loved his descriptions of food at the bars, cafes and restaurants he spent time in.

This is a book I will keep and read again and again.

I have the English and The French versions. The French version feels like a Paris travel guide.

Hemingway had been an important American writer for thirty to forty years. He was a combination of male macho and sensitivity. I like his three or four big novels including Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and Old Man and the Sea. Farewell to Arms has exception prose in the first chapter.

Recently, I spent some time in Paris and I re-traced some of the old cafés where Hemingway drank wine and spent time talking with his wife and fellow writers. One place on rue St. Germaine is now a Starbucks. I walked down the street where Gertrude Stein lived. My guidebook was the present book written by Hemingway in the 1950s. It is about his life in Paris in the 1920s on the south bank of the river, south of the University of Paris on and around Saint-Michel and Montparnasse, and in the areas between, and the people he knew. He was a poor and struggling writer living off of small royalty cheques from America. Paris has changed. Now it is a relatively expensive place to live. A modest apartment can cost a million dollars. But the atmosphere remains for those who can afford to live there: interesting and culturally diverse. As in Hemingway's day, there are still some cheap places to live.
The stories are (both in French and English, slightly different in translation):

- A Café on Saint Michel,
- Miss Stein,
- The Lost Generation,
- Shakespeare,
- Hunger Makes You Focus,
- People of the Seine,
- False Spring,
- The End of an Avocation,
- Ford Maddox,
- Birth of a New School,
- Pascin,
- Erza Pound,
- A Strange Enough Ending,
- The Man Was marked For Death,
- Evan Shipman,
- Agent of Evil,
- Scott Fitzgerald,
- Hawks Do Not Share,
- Matter of Measurements, and
- Paris Never Stops, or There is Never an End to Paris.

I liked most. 5 Stars.

Ernest Hemingway describes the city of Paris, France, where he lived after World War I, as a moveable feast. And it is obvious that he enjoys living there. I, for one, felt like I was living in Paris as I read the book. But Hemingway also makes a train trip from Paris via Eastern France and Switzerland to Schruns, Vorarlberg province, Austria. As a native of Austria, I enjoyed reading his description of his stay in Schruns as well, given the fact that he stood at a hotel called "The Dove."

I hadn't given this book a read in many years, and so after reading Hemingway's Boat, I decided to take it on again. It's funny, but it was as if I had never read it the first time. I think that as a writer and as an adult, and the commensurate growth in both, it's possible to understand things in a well-written piece of nonfiction - particularly a memoir - at a much greater depth. But then that depends on the skill set of the author. And whatever one might think about Hemingway, during his better years, he had the skills, the understanding, to put together such a piece of writing.

A Moveable Feast has endured because of its romanticization of Paris' writing scene during the 1920s, and because he wrote about many of the other literary luminaries of that era. He wasn't a name-dropper; his sketches of such persons as Ford Madox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, And Ezra Pound, as well as a lesser cast of writers, are in-depth looks at these friends and acquaintances and how they interacted.

Hemingway can be taken as smug in these sketches, and I'm that's there, given his ego. But he did have insight into people, places, situations, and these made him the preeminent writer he was. During this read, though, I couldn't shake the feeling that he was trying damned hard to see these personalities in the objective light of a journalist, but a journalist involved emotionally and professionally with most of these writers.

Of course, Paris itself is a character here, as well as a backdrop. Its importance to Hemingway and the other writers gathered there cannot be ignored. It was a haven, a crucible, a way to live and grow as writers on the cheap. And this is perhaps the singular thing that forced Hemingway to write this book.

With such talent in one place, success was eventually going to explode for them. And this is in a way what Hemingway laments. If you read the historical novel, The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, you'll understand more of how rich sycophants all but distracted these writers from their talent. In Hemingway's case, it ruined his first marriage, perhaps his only successful one, with Hadley Richardson. This drove him to look back on Paris romantically and at the same time with sadness, and thus he created perhaps his best piece of writing in A Moveable Feast.

"A Moveable Feast" is a wonderous quick read that manages to transport the reader back to the bohemian Paris of the 1920s like a magical time machine. Hemingway's personal, casual and intimate accounts of such figures as Ford Maddox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alistair Crowley and Gertrude Stein make the reader feel as though the reader has become great old friends with each of these romantic figures as well as with dear old grumpy Ernest himself. I read this book in preparation for a trip to Paris and when I got there, I almost expected to see Mssr. Hemingway at his favorite table at the Closerie de Lilas with a drink, his notebook and two blue pencils still writing observations about passers-by. Reading this marvelous little book is like taking a vacation back in time and as such brings renewal to a modern world weary soul.
(As a footnote, the Closerie de Lilas is still there but it is now one of the nicest restaurants in Paris and the sort of place Mssr. Hemingway would not have dreamed about stepping into; no matter how much money he had won on the horses. Read the book, you'll know what I mean)

Oh, to have had the pleasure of sitting with Papa Hemingway while he shared his thoughts and memories and ruminations! I have read "Death In The Afternoon," another non-fiction by Hemingway, and this is written in somewhat the same way. Very informal, almost as if Hemingway were sitting across from his reader, sharing a drink, and simply passing the time.

This is not written in Hemingway's normal style, and that is either something one will like or dislike. This book does get gossip-y, and for all of Hemingway's faults I'm not entirely sure he would have gone that far in having this book actually published. Still, it is what we have, and fans of Hemingway will enjoy reading about his view of Paris in the 1920s. Some folks might get pithy with Hemingway and declare that he wasn't all that nice of a man. Well, what a surprise! And I'm not always that nice, either. Who is? If you take this book at face value, it can be an enjoyable read. But there is quite a bit of "dish" about it.

For those who may not have read Hemingway before I really wouldn't recommend this particular book. One of his novels or some of his short stories might be a better selection. And those who are looking for something on Paris? I don't think I'd look to this book, either. It's more about a specific time in Paris, than about the city of Paris, in my opinion.

I was in Key West earlier this year, and one of the things I made sure to do between cocktails and conch salads was visit Hemingway's house. It's an incredible place, maybe the perfect writing space, and I want it.

Anyway, I hadn't read Hemingway in years, so while there, I picked this up. Released posthumously, it's a loose memoir about his years in Paris at the beginning of his career. He includes a lot of thoughts on writing, and on the people he knew there -- Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford -- as well as some picture perfect descriptions of the city.

What really surprised me, though, was how funny it was, how many wry observations and underplayed comic asides there were. I knew Hemingway was a master of rhythm, and when it comes to making you feel a bullfight or a battle with a tarpon, there ain't nobody better. But I hadn't remembered him as funny.

A MOVEABLE FEAST is many things to many people. First of all it is, as my title suggests, Papa Hemingway, near the end of his life, reminiscing about himself at the beginning of his writing career. Next, it is a commentary on a group of young American expatriates who came to be known as "the lost generation." Finally, though perhaps unintentionally, it is a physical guide for those of us who would like to explore the Paris of the 1920's.
I have no way of knowing whether or not the young Hemingway was ever as naive as he is painted by the older Hemingway. In scene after scene, Hemingway takes the most outlandish utterances at face value. As an example refer to his luncheon conversation with Ford Madux Ford. I won't ruin your fun by giving you the details. Along these same questionable lines, he describes his first wife, Hadley, as being a rather mild creature who follows his lead in everything without ever expressing a contrary opinion or desire. Fact, or tricks of an older man's memory? Who knows?
Regarding "the lost generation," we are treated to an anecdote wherein Gertrude Stein's mechanic first coins the phrase. We are also introduced to the likes of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company book store and publisher of Joyce's "Ulysses," and, of course, Gertrude Stein and her companion who remains nameless in this book. In the early years, Hemingway liked Stein and Hadley detested her nameless companion whose function was to "talk to the wives."
Now to my favorite part; A MOVEABLE FEAST as a guide to Paris as it was, and mostly, still is. On my last trip to Paris, I carried a copy of A MOVEABLE FEAST with me, and, with it, spent a couple of enjoyable afternoons on the trail of Hemingway, Stein, Pound, et al.
Since the book opens with the Hemingways living on the Rue Mouffetard, it was the beginning of my "lost generation tour of discovery." Rue Mouffetard is still there, not too far from the Latin Quarter and the River Seine. It isn't much changed from Hemingway's day with the possible exception of a modern underground bowling alley. One still sees meat display cases featuring pig snouts and ears, and skinned rabbits.
Many of the rest of the locations mentioned in the book are in Montparnasse within just a few minutes of each other, and again on the left bank, only a few minutes walk from the Seine. I started with Hemingway's apartment. The sawmill beneath it is gone, but the building still stands there. A few hundred yards up the street, Ezra Pound's house still stands. We were able to locate Gertrude Stein's apartment from the address given in the book, and sat in her courtyard waiting for Hemingway, Joyce, and perhaps Picasso to drop by.
Again, only a few hundred yards from Hemingway's apartment, we visited the Closerie des Lilas, Hemingway's "home cafe," where he could be found many mornings doing his writing. The only change is in the prices. These are only a few of Hemingway's haunts that can be located by using A MOVEABLE FEAST as your guide book.
In summary, for me, A MOVEABLE FEAST is a mini guide to my favorite city and a mini history of my favorite era in that city.

A tremendously beautiful work. I read it and learned a lot about Hemingway, his life, his friends, his craft...how he approached writing. For me as I make attempts at scribbling, I don't yet call myself anything as lofty as a writer, I am most impressed by how he wrote that 'the story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.' I thought, man, thats the best part of writing fiction when suddenly it burst forth out of you're subconscious into you're consciousness and you manage to translate it all onto the page. It's the natural, writer high, if you will that writers all quest after.

This is my 100th review and when I realized I was approaching number 100, I puzzled over what book to make my list as my 100th review. Hemingway immediately came to mind, but then the question was, which one? I finally decided on this, which may well be my favorite Hemingway work.
Even though it was published posthumously, this book does not reek of other hands having been all over it as have some other posthumous Hemingway publications. It has been questioned as to how much of this book is fact and how much fiction. Even Hemingway raised the issue at the beginning of the book. It doesn't really matter. In this book Hemingway is recollecting events that occurred over roughly a five year period which were over thirty years past when he started on the book. So, no doubt of it may well be fiction, given the passage of time.
But the book is monumental in that it is perhaps the quietest and most elegant of Hemingway's books. It is broken into chapters that recount various episodes in his life during that period he dwelled largely in Paris. It is sometimes funny, occasionally sad, but always intriguing. As I write this, I'm slowly convincing myself that it is my favorite work by him.
We are introduced to Hemingway's circle of friends and acquaintances from that period: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and the always interesting F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It's amazing how many other literary figures Hemingway came in contact with during his life and he gives interesting tales of all of them.
Even if you normally dislike Hemingway, I truly believe you will love reading this memoir. A true literary triumph and recounting of a time like none we will ever see again.

Let me start off by saying if you dont' like Hemingway, and aren't interested in what many consider one of the most well known periods in Anglo-American literary history then you'll probably find this book a good read but not much else.

To me it is fascinating how so many young people in one place either were famous or were to be come literary and artisitic incons.

The book is a lose autubiography of Hemingway as a young writer trying to make it in Paris with a wife & child. There are lose sketches of what has now become something of a cliche- the bohemian writer hanging out among artists and writers in the cafes of Paris- but here we have the reason for the cliche. He records his meetings with Erza Pound, Fitzgerald, G. Stein, and a couple of lesser known figures.

What's often missed in popular portrayls is just how hard Hemginway worked, which is made clear in the book but not in an abtrusive way.

This was the second book I read by Ernest Hemingway, but it was the book that I most wanted to read. I have always heard how beautiful this novel was, and it was underestimated. This novel is like poetry in prose. The descriptions of Paris are enough to make anyone romaticize about this city and his descriptions of his friends, family, and colleagues will make them seem almost more than human. There is a mixture of happiness, that he obviously felt during these years, and of melancoly of a man remembering a better time in his life. His love for his first wife is so obvious here that it seems so sad when, in the end, it fails. But most of all I loved the idea that Paris was a moveable feast, meaning that no matter where he goes in life he can take the experiences, feelings, and innocence of this time in his life with him to keep him warm. No matter how cold and rainy the winter may be, there will always be a spring.

This book is nothing short of stupendous. It's written straight as a collection of pastiches from when the author was one of the ex-patriates--due mostly to prohibition. Paris was the Mecca of the literary artist. For those of us stuck in vocations of repetition and bureaucracy, Hemingway's spontaneous, productive lifestyle in Paris will truly produce envy. The cuisine and the company will turn you green. Nothing will make you want a dozen oysters and a bottle of Sancere more. When I first read it I believed that he had been cruel to Fitzgerald, but I must modify that view now. It may be an accurate portrait of a man tied to a crazy spouse who constantly placed him under psychological siege. Hemingway is very sensitive towards the French working man, and his prose, for the most part, is up to his usual quality. I greatly enjoyed this book and recommend it as a grand vacation away from life's drudgery.

Reading 'A moveable feast' was a very rewarding activity. Why ?
It created a special new frame of mind inside of me, which lasted weeks after reading the book. This is pretty rare and even thought it has faded now, I know this story is something I will carry with me through further life, and it will bring me good things.
I think one can rightfully call Hemingway the 'master of small happiness', because this is the frame of mind I am talking about. The taste of oysters, wine and café-creme, the feeling of being in your favorite café, the feeling of writing and reading and -most important of all- the delight in discovering what people are like and the intense motivation to keep on making new discoveries: a boxer without teeth can provide you with an equally intresting evening/life lesson as a skilled poet can. What this book told me is: keep the eyes open,for incredibly intresting things are happening all around you every second, and always here and now.
How Hemingway achieved this, is a mystery to me. His writing is very simple, as if he's writing some kind of diary AND he puts in a lot of names I have never heard before. Usually, this isn't the ingredient for a good book as far as I am concerned.
Yet I was swept away and will surely buy more of his work. I can't wait to read how he describes Africa.
The way I see it: if somebody can bring out the same message in a simple story as A Huxley did in an incredibly complicated one, he deserves a lot of attention. As far as I am concerned, he will get it.

Why are Americans so crazy about Paris? One of the reasons is Ernest Hemingway and this little book with its name dropping and taut style that takes no prisoners.

I don't know if anyone actually reads Hemingway anymore (outside the US) or even if he is a good novelist.

However, I do know that he was certainly good for the tourism industry in a number of places such as Paris*, Venice, Cuba and Key West where many people make a living out of bars where Hemingway spent his time apparently churning out masterpieces. (Meanwhile across town at Les Deux Magots, Jean-Paul Sartre was writing about the meaning of meaning - or was it the meaningless of meaning?) Those were the days!

This book is a series of sketches in which Hemingway looked back at his early days when he, his wife and their baby son, named with tender loving affection "Mr Bumby", lived in poor circumstances in Paris.

I doubt whether many young people today have heard of some of the characters portrayed, such as Gertrude Stein, Hilaire Belloc, Alastair Crowley, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis or even Scott Fitzgerald** or are aware of their influence.

It is quite a good read but contains the kind of sentimental nonsense one expects when an old man looks back on his younger days or, dare I say, when an American sets foot in Paris.

Everything was "wonderful" and Hemingway was "friends" with everyone.

No-one could disagree that "eating was wonderful" or that beer was "wonderful to drink" but could a professional writer not have been just a teeny bit more original, nest-ce pas mon petit choux?

This wonderful world of Ernest Hemingway comes together most harmoniously in the case of James Joyce with whom Hem was "friends in this wonderful period after the finishing of Ulysses".

Hemingway was also always hungry and, in line with any book written about France by a foreigner, pages are devoted to food, washed down with drink.

Here are couple of quotes that will give you an idea of how hunger is very bad for a writer's style: "Memory is hunger", "I saw the plat du jour was cassoulet. It made me hungry to read the name." and my favorite: "I learned to understand Cezanne much better when I was hungry".

Bon appétit. Enjoy your read!

* Remember "Harry's New York Bar. Just say: Sank Roo Doe Noo."?
**Who was apparently so unsure of himself that he wanted to know if Hemingway thought his weenie was big enough.

Regardless of which side you believe (Patrick and Sean Hemingway's or A.E. Hotchner's) you have to admit the original version is hard to beat. It was superbly edited. It is an excellent book and a classic. With this edition, I enjoyed the new tidbits of information, the extra chapters not published before, and the photographs of the handwritten manuscript. It would have been better to reproduce the original faithfully, add the never-before-seen stuff as extra sections at the end of the book, and comment about it--whatever the bias or spin. The easy things they should have fixed, but didn't, are the flipped photos 5 and 6 in the insert. In later editions, those are mirror images of the ones in the 1964 version.

I have read most of Hemingway's books and avoided the posthumously published work: the exceptions being "A Moveable Feast" and "By-Line: Ernest Hemingway." Reading from the blurbs and gleaning from the noise and chatter, I wonder, could anyone claim with a straight face to know what Hemingway would have wanted? If he were alive he would punch that person in the nose, sit down, order a fine à l'eau, and not give it a second thought.

Leaving out the quote on the title page about how the book came to have its title is inexcusable. Mentioning it as an afterthought in the rambling Foreword is irresponsible. The Introduction sounded like a lot of rationalizing. The lead-in to the "Scott Fitzgerald" chapter was more poetic, and probably more true, in the original. If Patrick and Sean Hemingway had their way, this book would end with F. Scott Fitzgerald's worrying about the size of his manhood. Wait. In this "Restored" edition, it does.

I dislike this Internet age in which we live where everything is open to revision. Every year, authors of computer books trot out 2nd, 3rd,..., 100th edition of their original--with very little new information--in the hope of making a quick buck. Maybe it's inevitable the literary folks are thinking the same. What's next? A "Restored" edition of "To Have and Have Not" where language we now find objectionable is cleaned up?

My advice: It's not a bad idea to get this edition if you are a big Hemingway fan. I did. It's still excellent literature. If you want to get a feel of the Paris scene as it was when Hemingway started out, read this book. But get the original edition as it is much better.

Ah, Paris!!! "A Moveable Feast" is a memoire of Hemingway's poor but happy life as a young journalist turned novelist in 1920's Paris. Written in Hemingway's unique style, this book offers a variety of snapshots of the young author's life, Paris life in general and the people who comprised the Paris literary scene of the period.

I have only dreamed of Paris. Other than F. Scott Fitzgerald, I have only a passing knowledge of the people mentioned in this work. I am, however, a Hemingway fan, and I enjoy his efficient and straightforward style. The stories he tells and the scenes he describes make one want to be in Paris, and they make one want to learn more about the characters mentioned. In fact, while I applaud Hemingway's brevity, I actually wished for a little more depth--only Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were discussed in any detail at all.

I enjoyed this book, but if you are going to read Hemingway, this is not the place to start. "The Sun Also Rises" contains much of the same feeling for 1920's Paris, plus it features a great description of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. His best works though are "The Old Man and the Sea" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Those are the starting points.

This is a much mellowed Hemingway looking back late in his life at his young days in Paris with first wife Hadley. And it is such a beautiful portrait both of Paris and of his first marriage that no one can resist it. There is some really good writing here, especially the portraits of his fellow expatriots but its a personal memoir and as most writers will he makes it all seem so festive which it probably was but compare this to his novel Sun Also Rises or any of his several collections of stories and you are comparing mere reminiscences with substantial work. Still one imagines Hemingway enjoyed writing this and that last line of the book will kill you. Hemingway sentimental, here he is. But thats the charm of it. Its nice to see this side of him even though one knows this is a selectively imagined past minus the demons that drove him.

Hemingway is one of my favorite novelists. Fortunately, he is as terrific a non-fiction writer as he is a fiction writer.

He shows you a Paris that was so full of life, and opportunity; You can immediately see why American writers flocked there in droves in the twenties.

In this book, the writing is so good that you feel that you are drinking in the quaint Parisian bars until all hours, and that you, too, are drinking in all the sights and scenes of the most inspiring city in the world at that time.

Also, from his friendship with Gertrude Stein to the guilt he felt after an adulterous affair, Hemingway holds back nothing.

For two years I lived in Oak Park, IL, where Hemingway was born and raised. The community has made the house he lived in a museum honoring him, and holds a Hemingway festival. I sorely miss living there; it certainly isn't Paris back in Hemingway's time (what is?!)but it is wonderful to have a museum to such an adventurous American writer.

There are three perfect little books in 20th century English literature: The Good Soldier, by Ford, The Moviegoer, by Percy, and this sparse narrative written in Hemingway's familiar and still powerful limpid prose. There are descriptions here of many literary figures in Paris during the twenties and the famous cuts at Ford and Fitzgerald, but these are not reasons to read this book. You read this book to hear Hemingway speak to you with his guard down, as you cannot otherwise hear him except in the early Nick Adams stories. He is sitting at his typewriter in Ketchum, his great gifts chased from him by alcohol and hubris, and he remembers when he still had it, when he was poor and cold and hungry and he had Hadley, before he became Hemingway, and he types slow, each word pulled from the emptiness to become the next inevitable perfect word, and his words are the shroud over his loss, his bitterness, his grievous fault. This book was not published in Hemingway's lifetime. It was not written for us

I realize that I'd rather read about Hem's life than what he wrote...he was an egotistical womanizer and not much of a friend. He left his wife alone while he "pursued" his writing craft, he hung out with friends, but he wasn't much of a friend. Good thing he was dead when they published this book, since he revealed the diminished size of Scott Fitzgerald's manhood and the fact that he didn't accept the alternate life style of Gertrude Stein, but certainly enjoyed their money, wine and notoriety!

He leaves a lot of meat on the bone by writing himself in a positive light, and I found it a tad slow, but it’s still Hemingway. There is something to knowing about one of America’s greatest authors ever.

"...this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy." This is more than an autobiographical memoir of Hemingway's early years in Paris. It is a glimpse into a literary epoch, an intimate glimpse into the community of expatriate writers and artists who lived in Paris in the 1920s: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so on.

And of course, it is a chapter from Hemingway's own life, written thirty years after the fact. There are passages of rich, descriptive attention to sensory details - "As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture..." - very different from the often terse writing style of his novels and short stories.

The enduring treasure of this is a book is how it passes along a passionate attention to the details of life - so that the "moveable feast" is not just the experience of Paris, it is life itself.

A Moveable Feast is a short book that glances over Hemingway's years in Paris. I don't know that you could call this much of a memoir, it doesn't go into great detail, and just sort of skims over his years in Paris. It was definitely written by an older Hemingway, one who was full of himself and bitterness. The style of writing seems different. This isn't the Hemingway I know from his short stories. The narration seems almost child-like, and definitely not written as well as his short stories. But don't let me make you think I didn't enjoy this book. Hemingway is still the greatest and A Moveable Feast was a wonderful book to read, if only for his portrait of Scott Fitzgerald. And there is a lot more humor used here than in his short stories. This book didn't break into my list of favorites, but it came close.
(As a sidenote, if you enjoyed reading this, or want more like it, pick up Scott Berg's biography of Maxwell Perkins, _Max Perkins: Editor of Genius_, who was Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner's.)

Other than his short stories, I have never read much by Ernest Hemingway. When I picked this one up, I was intrigued. It was well worth the time!
A Moveable Feast is a lush account of life in Paris in the early 20s. Hemingway writes about life as a young writer struggling to hone his craft.
His descriptions of life in the cafes, at the race track, and traveling through Europe are vivid and full of life. He loved his life as a poor, struggling writer, and this comes through so honestly.
Name dropping is taken to a new level as he talks about his friendships with Stein, Picasso, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
This is an excellent introduction to Hemingway, and also to Fitzgerald, as reading A Moveable Feast helped me to understand Fitzgerald in greater depth.

I have a previous copy of "A Moveable Feast", but I was struck by the Forward by Patrick Hemingway and the three versions of the opening two lines of the Bible, and so I purchased this version. His description of "God's spirit soaring" over the waters; the source that created heaven and the earth. Now imagine the void and darkness without the seed (spirit) of Hemingway; that seems to me " covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure" . Patrick Hemingway is one man I would like to meet; who has done justice to his fathers work and memories.
Thank You and Best Regards,

Carl Routh
Houston, Texas

"A Movable Feast" offers a view of life in 1920s Paris through the eyes of a peripatetic American, Ernest Hemingway, who would later win the Nobel Prize for literature. More than drawing a distinct and clear picture of what it was like to live, work, and breath in life in Paris during the time leading to World War II, which this book does well, "A Movable Feast" offers a unique first-person account of life before fame and popularity.

Hauntingly, Hemingway ends "A Movable Feast" with this quote: "All things truly wicked start from innocence." Hemingway walks the reader through the many nuances of eating and drinking through a life of yes, poverty, but also happiness and (as he would likely phrase it) "joie de vivre," or a general joy of life and living. He paints a picture of personal and world innocence, foreshadowing the coming War and the many changes to buffet his life and career.

In the world of 2009, it is difficult to imagine living the life portrayed in this book (for example, living in a hotel in Austria for $2 a day for two adults and a child). That notwithstanding, this is an interesting and illuminating book that is worth reading for its educational and biographical aspects.

I enjoyed reading this more than Hemingway's novels. It's probably because I watched Midnight in Paris, and it gave me a greater appreciation for him. His writing is so spare, and it's really hard to think of his characters as real people. This was different, because it's his memoirs of the time he lived in Paris. It was especially interesting to read about his interactions with other authors and artists. I think I'll give another Hemingway novel a try to see if I've gained learner to appreciate his writing style.

I like a good story as much as the next guy. But this is not a good story.
This is a compilation of encounters between Hemmingway and various well known figures in Paris during the 1920's and his reflections of his own life and those of others. Although the author states that it may be considered a work of fiction, it has the feel of an autobiography, sort of.
No, it is not a good story. As a story goes, it is quite dull. The plot is non-existent and a seemingly enless train of mostly unrelated mundane anecdotes populate the slim novel. A day at the races, the fishermen on the Sein, a full description of every meal eaten in a scene (as well as the extensive list of alcohol imbibed) do not make for riveting fiction. It is brilliant.
Here is a work that is almost all style and no substance. This is art at its most sublime level. What Hemmingway did put in this novel was Truth. Truth with a capital T because I am not referring to the synonym of factual but instead the conveyence of reality. The rythym of the words set the pace of the city. The descriptions of things and places are brought to life with hypnotic clarity and with such consumate skill with words that it is difficult to put the novel down; not because you simply must know what will happen to the hero next, but because it seems a jolt to your own reality to be suddenly extricated from Paris. And yet, the simplistic sparse Hemmingway prose which brings these images to life, seem now as transparent as air. No flowery phrases, no poetry, just Truth.
For anyone who is curious what Hemmingway thought about Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein, for anyone who is curious what F. Scott Fitzgerald was like, and wonder about Hemmingway's opinion of him as a person and a writer, this should be the next book on your list.
This is truly a work of literature.

I bought this audio-book because I had heard James Naughton on Selected Shorts. Love his voice and reading. This version is great. I was surprised, I thought Hemingway had been very hard on Fitzgerald, but hearing this, he certainly was not. And I did not know he was a friend of Ezra Pound. And he liked him. I grew up in the '50's, all I knew of Pound, was the broadcasts from Italy and the time in a mental hospital here. And, this book is a great book to go to sleep to. James Naughton has other audio-books, they are mysteries, I do not think I would like to hear them over and over again.

Read Hemingway first, ( A SUN ALSO RISES & FAREWELL TO ARMS ) then take the journey... the making of the person, and people that influenced his writing.
First read THE PARIS WIFE
Second read HEMINGWAY'S GIRL
Third read A MOVABLE FEAST

Ah early 20th century Paris! Land of cafes and writers. Can you imagine having a drink in a cafe while sitting across the table from Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald while discussing their latest work? A Movable Feast gives you the chance to do just that. Hemingway takes us to glamorous Paris where the writing elite of the time have all descended to fine tune their craft. This book is so awesome. It's sort of a who's who of the cafe culture of Paris during the 1920s, a time period that I'm absolutely in love with.

This is really my first experience with Hemingway and as far as I know, this is one of his only non-fiction books. Even from this book with his friends and familiars as his focus, you can see why he's still so beloved by readers today.

Probably my favorite parts of the books were the parts about Hemingway's family and also F. Scott Fitzgerald and his family. This book is rare as it isn't too often that you get to hear first hand information about people that I really admire like this.

What I can say is that this book definitely whet my appetite to read more Hemingway.

I was never a great fan of Hemingway. I read The Old Man and the Sea in high school because it was short. Didn't like it. Then a friend recommended The Paris Wife and I loved it. When my son, who is an avid reader, suggested I read A Moveable Feast, I was ready for it and it did not disappoint! I've always been interested in the American expatriates in Paris -- F. Scott Fitzgerald a favorite of mine -- so it was great reading stories about all of these people written by one of the major characters.

After returning from a trip to Paris I decided to read this memoir by Hemingway because I heard he loved Paris as much as I. I have to say I imagined a beautifully descriptive book filled with telling prose and wonderful scenes of Paris. I love the way Hemingway writes but this book disappointed me. It may be that it was published after his death and slapped together without his perfectionistic control.

"A Moveable Feast" is an interesting read, simple even. If you know Paris you can even walk with Hemmingway along the Rues and conjure up a few old cafes that are still in business. If you are a writer it is nice to imagine yourself as the poor and struggling Hemmingway bent on a dream. But the stories are really nothing more than gossip about other writers and reknown figures such as, Fitzgerald, Stein, James, Pound and others flocking through Paris in the 1920's. I was hoping for more. The only paragraph I paid much attention to because of its "Hemingway" quality read like this, "They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure." Gems like this can be found but unfortuneately not often. Paris and Hemingway are both such profound enigmas that I expected a gourmet feast not just a trip to Denny's!

I used this book for my English practice to prepare to the GMAT and get better at writing essays. I know it is bizarre, but it is a gerat book for international students looking for style. Not a hard one, and a pleasant read. Especially good for RC and SC. Hemingway has good grammar.
I borrowed one from a friend and i really wish I owned a copy... I even wanted to buy it right now from the store for $0.85. I love the many moments of Hemingway's student life in Paris. His encounters with many prominent writers, and struggles to have meals regularly. Eventually, as he got broke, he was forced to go to Austria to a ski resourt... I guess that's exactly what I will do when I run out of my loan money. By the way, when you get to the Bschool, make sure to get as much money as you can...it is easier to return than to get.
Great for pensive melancholy evenings after a ding letter ;)

Something about Hemingway's account of his years as a struggling writer in 1920's Paris is incredibly endearing. As a glimpse into his thoughts about the circle of friends he later christened the lost generation A Moveable Feast is a very quick and entertaining entre' into the world of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald and others. I enjoyed it for it's descriptions of Paris cafe life and the commentary of these writers on the issues and the literature that was inspiring them at the time.

I haven't read Hemingway in a long time and this was probably a good selection for me personally as it will inspire me to go back and re-read some of his better known novels.

Hemingway was in bad and fast deteriorating health when he came to write this book. Under the circumstances it was remarkable that he still had it in him to produce this beautiful work of nostalgia. Although published posthumously, the book was fully completed before the author died.

It helps if you have first read about Hemingway's life in Paris during the 1920s, in which case the book takes on much more depth and meaning. Any reader, though, should enjoy Hemingway's hilarious account of his road trip with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the longest set-piece in the book. Perhaps no author has ever left a finer envoi.

Whenever friends ask me why, at my age, I still love Hemingway, I smile and think about this book. They say "Hemingway' and conjure up familiar visions of the older, bloated and blighted boozer bragging about his macho accomplishments in the world of war and sports, while I consider the young Hemingway in Paris. I am thinking of a much younger, intellectually virile man, someone far more alert, aware and alive; Hemingway as a `moveable feast' strolling deliberately through the streets of a rain-swept Paris on a quiet Monday morning, heading to a café for some café au lait to begin his long day's labor.

In this single, slim tome Hemingway beautifully and unforgettably evokes a world of beauty and innocence now so utterly lost and irretrievable both to himself, through his fame, alcohol, and dissipation, but also to us, for Paris as she was in the 1920s was a place made to order for the lyrical descriptive songs he sings about her in this remembrance; endlessly interesting, instantly unforgettable, and also accessible to the original "starving young artist types" so well depicted here. As anyone visiting Paris today knows, that magical time and place has utterly vanished. Tragically, Paris is just another city these days.

Yet this is a book that unforgettably captures the essence of what the word 'romance' means, and does so in the spare and laconic style that Hemingway developed while sitting in the bistros and watching as the world in all its colors and hues flowed by him. The stories he tells are filled with the kinds of people one usually meets only in novels, yet because of who they were and who they later became in the world of arts and letters, it is hard to doubt the veracity or honesty he uses to such advantage here. This is a portrait of an artist in full possession of his creative powers, full of the vinegary spirit and insight that made him a legend in his own time, and consequently ruined him as an artist and as a human being. There are few books I would endorse for everyone as a lifelong friend. This, however, is a book I can recommend for anyone who wants the reading enjoyment and intellectual experience Hemingway offers in such wonderful abundance in these pages.

Take my advice, though. Buy it first in paper, read it until it begins to fray and fall apart (and you will), and then go out and buy yourself a new hardcover edition to adorn your shelf, so on that proverbial rainy afternoon when the house is quiet, the kids are gone, and you just want to escape from the ordinary ennui and humdrum of life, pull "A Moveable Feast" down and hold it close enough to read. A cup of steaming tea by your side, return all by yourself to a marvelous world of blue city skyscapes, freshly washed cobblestone and unforgettable romance; return once more to Paris in the twenties, when life was simple, basic, and good.

My personal reading of Hemingway has spanned a lifetime. This short "memoir" aside from 'Islands in the Stream' and 'The Oldman and the Sea', has to be one of the top ten "must reads" for any Hemingway reader...or any reader.

Why?

A Movable Feast describes that (R)omantic time after WW1 in Paris when creative life exploded in all its forms: Picasso in art, James Joyce, F. S. Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound; surealism, cubism and ultimately expressionism. Writers travelled to Paris or more so, 'gravitated' to the beautiful city and worked, starved and immersed themselves in their particular art froms.

This is a 'tale' of the 'Starving Artist', as Hemingway descibes his hunger - the smells of bread along the small streets, his belly taking over while his mind focuses entirely on food - though the writing continued no matter his lack of food or his beloved drink.

For example: "Chapter 8" "...you got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw a smelled the food." (p. 50)

A Movable Feast is a general description of Hemingway's experiences without the details of gossip of the famous and infamous people he encountered.

As the author writes at the beginning: "For reasons sufficient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and some were known by everyone and everyone has written about them and will undoubtless write more." (Preface)

Fair enough.

In a biography of James Joyce, and interesting event occurred, (not mentioned in this text). Hemingway, in awe of the Irish genius, invites him to a famous bar which he and Fitzgerald had been drinking since the morning. The dapper Joyce arrives late in the afternoon, reserved as always, when some Parisian ruffian begins to insult Joyce. In true Hemingway character, he duly throws the ruffian out the front window. If memory serves, Joyce promptly bid his adieu and left. This is without doubt Hemingway in true (drunken) character.

This is an unreliable historical document but the perspective of a man writing about a time in his life that has he will never forget because of the time and personalities he met.

One of Hemingway's best and most entertaining.

In Hemingway's own words:

"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 movable feast." (A letter to a friend - 1950)

I'm a huge Hemingway fan, so finding a book that he wrote as more of a narrative of his personal life was a big sell to me. PLUS i love Paris and am fascinated by the life he lived. This gives you a glimpse into his life in Paris. A must read if you like Hemingway as much as me :)

Honestly, I am recommending this book solely on the last three or four chapters where he talks about the Fitzgeralds. In those pages, Scott Fitzgerald comes to life and is held immortal in its print. The rest of the book is interesting and held my attention even though I don't know who everyone is that he talks about. I recognize their names though - Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound - and believe those parts would have been a lot more enjoyable if I had already read their work. One thing at a time ... I'll get to them eventually. It would also help to be familiar with the layout of Paris for he describes his the routes of his walks in detail.
It strikes me, though I am not a writer, that this book should be read by anyone who aims to write. He describes the "writing process" and talks about what worked for him and what didn't. More importantly, he talked about being hungry as a new writer ... words of encouragement no doubt when those to follow his footsteps and wonder if hunger is the precursor to failure.

For a book written by one of the supposed greatest writers of all time, I found myself less in love with Paris, and more in love with the idea that I wanted to get drunk and jump off a bridge. This book is maddeningly slow and the characters are forgettable.

This is my favorite Hemmingway so far. I felt as though I had walked the streets with him... stopping off at a cafe for a quick au lait, before heading toward Shakespeare's & Company for book. This is certainly one of the best slices of time from an American ex-pat in Europe. It's earthy and interesting... plain, but rich in detail.

OK, so if Hemmingway's contemporaries seem so interesting and brilliant, who are our fabulous minds? Will we not know them until we look back on their lives from their grave? Certainly it won't be these idiot celebrities that have their faces pastered on magazines. Who shall they be, my contemporary thinkers, writers, and artists?

Ernest Hemingway was not a good person to be friends with and a terrible person to be married to, disloyal and full of rationalizations. But Hemingway was very good at making the reader experience the place and time. You will feel like you are there in Paris during the jazz age. Hemingway will make you remember being 20-something, poor, in love, and married to the one you were in love with. Hemingway's character sketches are detailed and colorful, and the malice he displays toward his friends, some of the most famous figures of the early 20th century, is kind of amusing. Hemingway lets regret seep in about his first marriage, which is touching. Then he blames his second wife for stealing him from his first wife, and the rich for corrupting him! Hemingway can never stop rationalizing and reinventing reality. A lot of the book is about being very poor and hungry. He was never very poor. His first wife, Hadley, had a trust fund which they actually lived on, and he left her for someone skinnier and with a bigger trust fund and a rich uncle!

This book could very well be the best of Hemingway.
A Moveable Feast was published after Hemingway's death and many feel that he would never have wanted it published. I'm very glad they did. It is a memoir of Hemingway's time in Paris during the 1920's. During that time he and his first wife, Hadley, lived on $5.00 a day.
I first heard of this book in the movie, City of Angels (Nicholas Cage, Meg Ryan). In it, Cage reads a quote from it to Ryan. The quote interested me and I bought the book. I was amazed.
The characters in this book are extroridnary including everyone from Ezra Pound to Aleister Crowley. He narrates stories including F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda that are so acidic they almost hurt to read.
Hemingway was at his best when he wrote this book. It is a memoir of an aging man looking back on a very happy time in his life. Its a great place to start for Hemingway beginners and a touching read for Hemingway veterans.

In those days there was no money to buy books or food, but we went to the racing every day. You could sit in a cafe to work until Ezra or Miss Stein or that cad Ford Madox Ford showed up.
It was a fine time in Paris and every cafe he passed he saw writers whose stories were wonderful to read. He wrote about himself and his friends. His odd way of writing seemed good and true and fine. Even if you did not always like his novels his own story was amusing.
"Hem," he said to himself, "To have come on all this new world of writing...was like having a great treasure given to you." Ah, there was a memoir worth the reading.

If anyone could build Paris out of words... Hemingway has succeeded. In "A Moveable Feast" first published in 1964, not only does he recreate Paris out out of mere words, he captures the essence of Paris in the 1920s. If you've been to Paris before, read this book. If you've never been to Paris, read this book while sitting in a Paris cafe or park. Get your tickets soon and don't forget to bring along Hemingway's prose. Further, if love writing, read this book. If you ever thought about writing, read this book. "A Moveable Feast (1964) also goes extremely well with "Hemingway On Writing" (1999), "Seven At The Sevens" (2012), and "Reading Like A Writer (2006). Bon voyage.

Hemingway utilizes an interesting short-story-type format to give an excellent feel for Paris in the 1920s, the artists who lived there, and his own character as a young man. "With Pascin at the Dome" is my favorite section of the book; it never fails to instill in me the sense of contentment that Hemingway experienced in his simple living and extreme productivity. The style is typical of the existentialists; the prose is lean and content is exceptionally easy to glean. This book is a must-read for all Hemingway fans.

I read it because I just finished "The Paris Wife" which I loved. I was very disappointed. I find memoirs generally uninspiring but I at least expected this to have great writing. He had some great SENTENCES but the chapters rambled and were quite hard to make sense of.

A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of his early days in Paris, is nearly bursting with rich, poignant details of what it was like to be young and hopeful and excited. It's all there--Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the horse chestnut trees in bloom. Perhaps more than the reminiscenses of actual people and places, however, is Hemingway's sense of how good it was to be young. At times, you almost feel that Hemingway's heart was breaking as he recalls the beauty of his youth. Whether the stories are fact or fiction doesn't matter--Hemingway creates an aching poetry in these lovely, long ago days in Paris.

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets

This book is most useful for casual research into the writers of the 1920s and 1930s through one of their own, who reveals them and what he learned of the time in a series of carefully constructed, emblematic sketches. It does not make for good entertainment or literary reading, as it is not dense enough in topic for that, but one can learn quite a bit about personae such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. For this alone I found it meaningful, but skimmed most pages, since the information offered was either sparse or tedious. What goes unstated in these pages is Hemingway's autodiagnosis of his generation and self: with less drama of the persona, with less emphasis on manipulating others, with more honor, they could be more like the selfless and gregarious Ezra Pound and less like the self-serving and manipulative Gertrude Stein.

This is one of those books that you simply have to read. It transports you in time to a place you wish you were and a life you wish you had led. This is perhaps one of Hemingways best books. It's fun to read about people he actually interacted with. These are historical figures that are well known- which makes it all the better. As a side note, okay a pretentious side note, people NOTICE when you are reading Hemingway. They look at you like your just a bit above the crowd. They should- Hemingway was amazing. If you haven't read it- pick up a copy. If you have- read it again!

The book itself is in good condition but the jacket,which isn't this case is the most important part as a first edition, is not in very good shape at all. It looks like it's had some water damage or even bugs got to it, not sure. I have had to take the jacket off and put it aside to avoid any further damage. In any case, I am happy to have such a rare find at a good price, just wish I could keep the jacket on to enjoy it.

What starts as such a wonderful beginning with so many promises, sadly ends in a tragic finish, just like Hemingway's real life.

The first few chapter evokes such strong images and feelings that no author can sustain such a toxicating mixture without causing a stupor in the reader.

Is the book worth every dollar and more, of course, but just like the city of Paris, the author seduces you and then lets you know you are just another mortal on a brief visit to an eternal city.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." (Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast)

Posthumously published memoir of Ernest Hemingway as he reveals the details of his life in Paris as a young man. His exploits with writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald shed light on the group of writers referred to as "The Lost Generation." I am a big fan of Hemingway, so this insight into his life was a real treat.

Hemingway's memoirs of his charmed years living the writer's life in Paris of the 1920's is filled with nostalgia for an era gone by (he actually put this book together decades later after the fact) and amusing anecdotes galore of well known literary figures of the era and locale. This book will make any fan of Hemingway long for days spent writing the hours away in cafes followed by a night filled with drinks and frolic.

This book is just terrible. It was edited by some very selfish relatives who wanted to see their "family Limb" presented in a better light. They failed miserably. Stick to Ernest Hemingway's version. (Too bad we did not get to see the "real original" before his 4th wife got hold of it.)

I bought "A Moveable Feast" for the mere reason that the title was fascinating to me. What a brilliantly simple yet eternally poignant title it is--and that's just the title, for what's inside is truly sublime.
I am sorry for Hemingway, in a way, that his private musings were published for all the world to see after he took his own life. I am joyous, nevertheless, that they were. Imagine, for instance, the delicious details that no one would have known about the real lives of some of the greatest writers of the 20th century...I am especially fond of his caricatures of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. These are sure to be enjoyable to most any reader. Hemingway offers candid, thoughtful snapshots and reflections of Fitzgerald that forever change the way we think of the creator of one of the most famous and widely read novels of the last century, "The Great Gatsby." This masterpiece is a wonderful bridge for those who think they "don't care for Hemingway." That said, not everone who picks it up will automatically be changed by it because the reader must be in a certain place of his or her life for these reflections to speak to his or her heart. Peering into Hemingway's mind is not for the light-hearted or simple-minded. It is for the reflective soul. This book is a sincere revelation of the pure joy that we can summon when we reflect on and revel in our experiences of the beauty of life. In the same way that Paris, his friendships, his unique antecdotes about seemingly mundane situations, and the like were "moveable feasts" to Hemingway, so too can beautiful joys in our own lives be with us at all times and in all places. I only wish that Hemingway had remembered to bring his feasts with him the fateful day that he took his genius from the world.

Interesting book of short stories, published after his death, that deal with the time Hemingway spent in Paris in the 1920s. He writes of the people he knew there (Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and many others), his method and execution of writing (including many explanations about his particular style), his love for the city of Paris and that of his first wife (he was quite the romantic!). A great glimpse into the young Hemingway.

It was a joy to read such intimate slivers of so many influential literary lives. I love both Hemingway and Fitzgerald and to see the candid and tragic portrayal of the latter from a close friend was really a treat. There will never again be a post war Europe like the one you will visit here. The personal insights into Hemingway's struggles and writing process were invaluable. I highly recommend.

I read this in high school and was fascinated by it. I enjoy reading Hemingway's fiction, but this is one of my favorite books of all time. I always recommend this book to people who have never read it. Definitely something I need to read again.

A "Moveable Feast" is a memoir of the years Hemingway spent in Paris in the 1920s. He wrote it in the 1950s after recovering notebooks he'd filled during the Paris years. In some ways, the book reads as a tabloid magazine with what feels, at times, like heavy name-dropping. Hemingway did spend a lot of his time with well-known writers of the day, such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. I got the sense he plucked the most famous people from his notes to reminisce on. While Hemingway brought the book to final draft form during his life, his fourth wife and widow, Mary Hemingway, did the final edits on the book that was published posthumously in 1964. There is a restored edition that is supposed to be more in keeping with what Ernest Hemingway had intended that includes some of his sketches, a foreward by his son, Patrick, and an introduction by his grandson, Sean. I did not read the restored version but the original 1964 edition. I almost would be interested in reading the restored version too to see what differences there are. It is possible that Ernest Hemingway did not feel the need to name-drop as much as his widow? Fortunately, I know some of the women in my book club have read the restored version so I will just settle with the book club discussion on the differences.

My number one comment on this book is that it just didn't stay with me from reading to reading. It may be because it was a memoir and not a novel. I don't read a lot of memoirs so I don't have prior experience to go on. With novels, however, I find myself thinking about the characters and the story a lot throughout the day, even when I'm far from reading time. It may also be that Hemingway's writing style doesn't resonate with me. He was known for a simple, direct and unadorned style. I really like vivid descriptions that paint a full color tapestry scene in my imagination.

One personal struggle I had with reading it is that I really have no clue on how to pronounce French words. I have no background in the French language at all except for singing Ah! Je Veux Vivre in college. And in that case, I only learned how to pronounce the French in that song. An audio version would have helped with the pronunciation but then I wouldn't have seen the word spelled out. I should probably start looking them up online as I'm reading. I have friends who read with little tape flags to mark words they want to look up. I might need to take up that habit... at least with books with French in them.

I read "The Old Man and the Sea" and "A Farewell to Arms" ages ago (assigned high school reading). I certainly don't remember them being favorites. Maybe I will reread one of his novels at some point. Or try another one. This was a quick read, but if it hadn't been a book club selection, I probably would have put it down a few chapters in and moved on to something else.

I must admit to not being an admirer of Hemingway. He did what he did, and had a style which was his own, but someone like Orwell writes circles around him. That is not to say that Hemingway is unreadable: not at all. This little book--which one could polish off in a couple hours--is a pleasurable excursion into an epoch--maybe not the belle epoque--which saw a group of world-class artists gathered in one place, Paris, at one time, the '20s. If one has been to Paris (which is where I bought my copy of this book), there will be much more utility to the reader. But even if one hasn't been, the portraits Hemingway presents of such literati as Joyce, Stein, Fitzgerald, et al., are interesting enough to sustain the reader's attention.

I suppose A Moveable Feast could be called a `light' work by Hemingway, which is a rare thing indeed. Here he displays humor, both self-depreciating and humor (often cruel) cast on others. The work is also short; there is the impression that so much more could have been done with this work.

What strikes me on this read of A Moveable Feast is how weak Hemingway envisioned his creative gift. He sees any number of possible obstacles in his creative process: talking about it too much, drinking, bad wives, the rich.

Writers approach writing from different angles, of course. But it amazes how indistinct Hemingway's creative self was; compared to his macho public persona, his creative self was hanging by a thin thread indeed.

Hemingway towards the end of his life penned a Moveable Feast which is a series of short stories which serve as a semi-memoir describing his early years living in Paris in the 1920's.

In a Moveable Feast, Hemingway provides a fascinating snapshot of a time and a place, but as a member of a larger expatriate community of English and American artists, he also provides a series of fascinating vignettes highlighting of the personalities and foibles of these artists many of whom would go on to be household names. As an example his story involving assuring F. Scott Fitzgerald of the adequacy of his "manhood" is both very humanizing and humorous.

Hemingway infuses these stories with a palpable sense of reminiscence and regret which is profoundly moving. Although in this period, Hemingway was a struggling writer at times desperately poor, supporting a wife and small child, he is obviously happy, productive and in love. As he admits it was a time with concerns and worries, but also with great simplicity, a simplicity which was so obviously missing from his later life.

On a personal note I found myself empathizing with Hemingway the joy and wonder he feels as he discusses he discovery of the classic authors of the past and ultimately being envious of the experience of living in Paris between the wars.

.

If you need any reason to read or reread the early stories (the Nick Adams stories), this book supplies it for you. Here is the early Hemingway who writes the things we love to read; simple and not self-conscious, describing with purity and exactitude. How he recaptured the truth and honest ambiguity of those early days, so late in his creative life, is nothing short of a miracle in prose writing. The famous and fallible Hemingway makes appearances, to be sure, but please ignore the very few petty bits for the sake of the glorious everyday honesty you will find in places here.

Guess what? A lot of people really like Hemingway. There are those who have never studied or even read another great author of the 20th century who has read Hem. This book was published after his death and I wonder if this wasn't something he wrote for his own kind of fun to attack and belittle everyone he knew in those years. Almost a practice writing exercise with malicious intent: read it carefully, F. Scott is famously viscously trashed but so is every single person he meets. My feeling is that if he was in his right mind - if you were to read anything about his last years he was in very bad shape - he would have destroyed this before he killed himself.

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.

My favorite of all Hemingway's works...in fact, it was the first I read and inspired me to become a devotee of the author. It's always a pleasure to re-read this charming little book and my dog-eared old copy is a prized possession. You can almost taste the wine...the oysters...hears the bells of Notre Dame! The skinny on F. Scott Fitzgerald is laugh-out-loud funny. A real classic and a great way to introduce Papa to the novice.

It's a description of a holyday, but he was working too, so it's not actual a holyday.
We were eating.
We were walking.
I watched people.
Then we were eating again.
Then I wrote a good story.

He didn't like Getrude Stein.

I ordered a potato salad and the beer was cold.

Then we were walking.

And eating.

We watched horse racing.

Then we went for a walk and hit a cafe.

Then we were walking.

In Paris.

A Movable Feast is such an interesting look at life. I think the strongest part of the book was his way of extracting thoughts about life from the people he met and the little things he did. It seemed like everyone he met, he came away with a metaphor or something to life by. One of my favorite quotes from the book was after he had his meeting with the painter Pascin, "They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who makes jokes in life, the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure." I think his comments on life are what make the book so interesting and such a picture into how he felt. Another very strong point of the book were the characters. Although they were real people, he characterized them in such a way that he could say relatively little about them and they felt like such developed characters. It was especially amazing that so many famous people were in Paris at one time and it added so much to the story to learn about what they were like as people in just in passing during Hemingway's life. Many of them were just aquaintances but you came away with an understanding of them. There wasn't much of a plot so people who like big rockus plots wouldn't necessarily enjoy it, it was more of just a memoir of a specific point in time. The imagery was strong and added much to the pictures you got in your mind of Paris at that time and he used it to further his point, like how it felt being in Paris at night. His detail makes the book interesting and I enjoyed how when he had dialog it was as though the people were actually speaking, complete with curses and just obscure topics of conversation that any friends would have. It was in this way the characters came to life as well, and they were all interesting characters with vices and differences that Hemingway made sure to note to an often comic effect. Another aspect that made me really enjoy the book was it's pictures of what it is like to be a writer. I loved how he talked about his work and how certain times and places you could write so easily while others you couldn't. The book really seemed to be about what it is like to be alive and he took a very indepth and insightful approach to that which was easy because they were "very poor and very happy." I think not all people would enjoy this book because of it's longwindedness and wealth of detail that makes the story move rather slowly along with the fact that there is no fast moving plot. However it was a very enjoyable read and anyone who likes detail, interesting characters and a look at work, love and being alive.

It was most interesting to read about the companions/friends of E H. I had read PARIS WIFE and liked it very much and now even more curious as to why he left Hadley for Pauline. Terrible mistake.
Sad to read about Fitzgerald but no surprise; think what he could have done without Zelda - bad influence..

Style was obviously in his later days - use of "and" to joing run on sentences got tiresome but then he wasn't in top form and he knew it.
Glad I read the book; have read most of Hemingway. Fascinating books and dynamic man with very complicated family and friends.

This book was immensely entertaining because you get to hear about what certain authors were like. We see Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot all through the eyes of Hemingway. Hemingway's descriptions of Paris and of his writing process are often very beautifully written and fascinating. This book is a quick read, although it does not have much narrative (which is fine, but if you are expecting a plot, forget about it), and is somewhat disjointed.

Ernest started writing this book in Cuba in the autumn of 1957, worked on it in Ketchum, Idaho, in the winter of 1958-59, took it with him to Spain when we went there in April, 1959, and brought it back with him to Cuba, and then to Ketchum late that fall. He finished the book in the spring of 1960 in Cuba, after having put it aside to write another book, The Dangerous Summer, about th violent rivalry between Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguin in the bull rings of Spain in 1959. He made some revisions to this book in the fall in 1960 in Ketchum. It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris.

This book is an O.K. book I say. Hemingway is talking about how the atmospher in the small city Paris works for artist such as writer and painter. He is basically talking about his personal life and he uses a very straight and strong phrase. He shows all of his sides in this book: the good and the bad. Who can ever says, after reading this, there ain't no moveable feast in nowhere? I guess nobody.

I've read this book twice and I'll probably read it everytime I want a dose of Hemingway or to time travel to Paris' literary golden age. I love this book! When I read it I feel as if I am there with Hemingway experiencing his sardonic sense of humor, his friendships, his striking ability to hold a grudge and get back at friends in print, and to understand a bit more about the mind that created such beautiful work.

This is a thoroughly nasty book. Not a celebration of Paris or anything else, but rather an attempt by an aging and embittered man to settle scores (imaginary and otherwise) against people no longer able to defend themselves.

Take the chapter on Ford Madox Ford. Hemingway was well aware that Ford was the superior novelist, but rather than confront him on that level, he makes a point of mentioning Ford's horribly foul breath. The heroic ambulance driver fails to add that Ford's lungs were nearly destroyed in a gas attack while he was leading troops in the trenches. Very classy, particularly since Ford's injuries later killed him.

Similarly, Hemingway bends over backwards to make it seem that something of Lovecraftian depravity was going on between Gertrude and Alice, while presenting no evidence whatsoever. You don't have to be a radfem or a Stein idolater either to find this obnoxious.

And on it goes, one chapter after another, almost without relief. It's difficult to grasp what readers see in this thing. I can only surmise that they've been blinded by Hemingway's genius. Though in point of fact, there's little enough of that in evidence here. This book was written by the man who wrote so gloatingly of rotting "Kraut" corpses during World War II. If you want the artist who changed fiction writing so profoundly and permanently, you'll have to look to the early novels and collections.