A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

This little book is a memoir of Hemingway that takes us to Paris in the 1920s, where he lived for around five years with his first wife Hadley and his toddler son Bumby pursuing a career as writer.

A Moveable Feast is a refreshing, adorable, most entertaining recount of his doings and acquaintances in the City of Lights: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co bookshop where American expats could borrow books; the formidable couple of Gertrud Stein and Alice Toklas receiving in their salons replenished with Picassos and Cezannes; the eccentricities of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald; as well as his long sessions observing the circulating fauna whilst writing at cafés.

The book is constituted by a series of notebooks that had been left forgotten in a trunk at the Paris Ritz, and retrieved only in the late fifties.

Hemingway was in the process of gathering and recording such memories at the time of his death. The book appearing posthumously in 1964.

This is definitely a book that I cannot but wholeheartedly recommend to read, and I am very glad to have it added to our Classic Collection here at the SMSA.

We look forward to hearing your comments about A Moveable Feast!

Reviewed by Liliana Navarro
Library Assistant