I knew I would love A Moveable Feast, as it deals with Hemingway’s personal life as a young writer in Paris in the 1920s.
The book isn’t regarded as fiction, though the style is very similar to The Sun Also Rises, which he is writing towards the end of the book. When you learn that A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, it makes Hemingway’s oeuvre a circling movement, always starting where it finishes. And it is exactly because of this ongoing movement that you can keep reading his work throughout your life, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you know about his life and times in Paris, Spain and Cuba–because evidently you will and you will love his novels even more.
If only for the tons of literal anecdotes and references, A Moveable Feast will suck you deep in the world of writers and poets such as James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, who are all sitting in bars and cafes discussing life, times and politics and they never seem to do what they are all famous for: writing. But it was done. Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby and Joyce had just finished Ulysses, to name a few; but it is Gertrude Stein whose voice can be heard on every page. They had a falling out, Hemingway and Stein, and while he owed almost everything to her–as well as hated her with an intense fury–at the moment of writing, she is portrayed rather lovely, though a bit cynical at times. It is because of Stein that Hemingway found his vocation and innovative way of storytelling that–you learn while reading the book–isn’t preserved for fiction, but is also present during his recital of the Paris years.
It is his directness that grabs me. And the feeling that the other characters in the book, while playing important roles in his life, aren’t lesser human beings; but are simply unaware of his talent–which he describes not by name, but by approximation–and the fact that he would be remembered long after their names have been erased and forgotten by the many.
Do I like this book, because I am a writer? They didn’t have a clue of what they would all become, especially Hemingway, who didn’t have a lot of success at that time. Publishers rejected his short stories. They rejected Hemingway. As Gertrude Stein says in one of the great chapters in the book: “That’s what you are. That’s what you all are. You are all a lost generation.” It comforts me. All the rejections I have to endure these days myself, they are all worth it when I picture myself walking in Paris someday, and I see my novel placed in the windows of the bookstores on both sides of the road.
I know it is too good to be true, but A Moveable Feast makes me believe I can achieve greatness. And the scenery of Paris is perfect, as it is placed in a fictional memory and averse from all that is lost. In romance, young Hemingway and his wife Hadley struggle through life as if they didn’t have a clue of the circling paradox of fiction to which they were contained.
A genius and his lover, and life they still had to gain.
