'A Moveable Feast' by Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway (3.5)

Hemingway’s famous memoir/not-memoir takes us back to a simpler time to the City of Light in the 1920’s where he and his (first) wife lived before his first novel was published. While I don’t love Hemingway’s writing style, I did enjoy his simple stories of the places and peoples that make up the starving artist’s life in Paris after WWI. From the neighborhood cafes to the bookshops, it’s a city that feels much more approachable than the one found today. I particularly enjoyed his interactions with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, though he cleverly starts the book with a question mark over whether it is a memoir or not. It is left up to the reader to determine how true he has been to the real characters. Overall, he comes across more likeable as a young writer than old, but that may be because this tale covers good times with his first wife. Only at the end does he gloss over the events that ended that marriage – the affair- and you remember his large reputation as a egotistical lout. I found it interesting that he wrote these remembrances at the end of his life and it was published posthumously. In some ways it seems like a love letter to his first wife and the city they enjoyed.