T.E. W. (terez93) reviewed on 10/10/2019 + 323 more book reviews

Hemingway has always been one of those love-him-or-hate-him authors, as demonstrated by the wildly fluctuating ratings of this book, which is unique from his many others. First and foremost, I like this novel most because it offers a more direct window unto Hemingway's world, at a crucial point in Europe's history and in his own artistic and personal development. It takes the form of an autobiographical novel about his glorious years as a young writer in Paris after his defection from journalism to become a novelist. As such, it chronicles his triumphs and tragedies at the outset of his brilliant career. Hemingway was married to his first wife (the first of four), and had his young son at the time as well.

The setting is the incomparable 1920s era, although the book wasn't published in its present form until 1964. In fact, it was published posthumously, based on a series of manuscripts and notes he left behind, which were subsequently compiled by his fourth wife/widow Mary, three years after his death by suicide, an act he committed with his favorite shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. This edition was published by his grandson, Sean, in 2009, and includes some of the author's draft notes and photos of the handwritten manuscripts, now housed in the Kennedy Library in Boston.

It's the novel that almost wasn't: in 1956, Hemingway reportedly received two steamer trunks he had stored in the basement of the Hotel Ritz in Paris, which had been there since 1928, containing a series of notebooks with writings he had penned during this period in the early 1920s. His biographer reported that they were having lunch there, along with the hotel's chairman, who mentioned that two of Hemingway's trunks were still in storage, one of which was a personalized original made by none other than Louis Vuitton. The chairman had it brought to him, and in it, along with some long-lost personal effects, were a series of lined notebooks he had filled with scribblings while sitting at cafes and other locations throughout the city. Hemingway then had the notebooks transcribed, and began revising them into a cohesive whole that would eventually take the form of the novel "A Moveable Feast." A fortuitous find, indeed.

The enigmatic title is derived from a statement Hemingway wrote to a friend, in 1950, which states, in part: "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." The term itself apparently refers to a holy or feast day without a fixed date; thus, it's always transient and can appear unexpectedly.

The novel, which is more of a type of journal, describes the author's life in Paris of the Roaring 20s, consisting primarily of his own personal experiences and particularly incisive insights and observations, told from the perspective of an outsider working his way into the Parisian elite artist community, with members such as, in particular, Gertrude Stein, about whom he is ambivalent at best, Sylvia Beach, of Shakespeare and Company Fame (whom his son calls "Silver Beach, such a great name"!), James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and the ever tempestuous Fitzgeralds, Scott and Zelda, the former of which is discussed at some length in the final chapters, and in a far-from-flattering way. Thus, it's something of a hybrid novel, consisting part of a personal narrative, along with a style and content clearly influenced by his time spent as a journalist, punctuated by gorgeous, atmospheric descriptions of the City of Light, which serves as the constant backdrop for the dramas that naturally unfold.

------------Notable Passages-----------
As Hemingway's Spanish Civil War-time friend Antoine de Saint Exupery observed in his book, Le Petit Prince, it is only with the heart we can see rightly, as the essence of things is not visible to the eye.

When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people, and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not completely trust anyone...

He liked the work of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment.

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding.

Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.

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