Review: A Moveable Feast

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Earlier this month, I decided to read a few of Hemingway's best works. The short story, The Old Man and the Sea, impressed me but I wasn't sure he was worth all the fuss. So I figured I would start with this title, A Moveable Feast, which is not fiction but rather tells about Hem (as he was called by friends) as a young, poor, struggling writer in Paris from 1920 to 1923. It was published after his death from groups of notes he left behind. I do appreciate elegant economy of his sentences.

This is a good book. Not great, but good. It was fun to get a view into the everyday lives of struggling artists and to imagine growing up in this era. He hung out with a motley crew of expats, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. The conversational snippets with Gertrude Stein alone made the book worth reading. If accurate, the exchanges reveal a truly nasty lady....although he always consider her a friend, despite her barbed and disagreeable nature. Little things like this were intriguing. I liked this book enough to move forward and have just started For Whom the Bell Tolls!

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