This week’s reading of A Movable Feast included Chapters Nine through Sixteen. The chapters continue Ernest Hemingway’s tale of his life in Paris in the early 1920s.
I liked the Hemingway I met in these chapters. I saw him as a young man. Up to this point my mind had been thinking of him as the great writer of The Old Man and the Sea, the big game hunter, and the Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner. But in these few pages I looked at the young twenty-five-year-old who knows he has “plenty to learn everywhere.” (p.103) At this of his life, his whole career was ahead of him.
Hemingway appears very honest about his observations of people and places. He’s looking with his eyes, his taste buds, and also his sixth-sense. An example was his meeting with Ernest Walsh. As soon as Hemingway met him, he knew he was a con man.
Hemingway made me want to read Ezra Pound again. Hemingway painted such an admirable picture of both the man and the poet. He gave Pound credit for having taught him so much. Hemingway said, “. . . here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic, then the man who believed in the mot juste -the one and only correct word to use – the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives . . . ”
The passages moved me. Those were my impressions of this week’s readings. So enjoyable. In next week’s reading I’m looking forward to hearing about Hemingway’s meetings with Scott Fitzgerald. At the very least, it should be interesting.
For more on the A Moveable Feast Read-A-Long, visit UnPutDownables.
I’m confused as to where to stop. I decided to stay with the Moveable Feast I checked out and not the one you have pictured. If I’m reading it right that means I only had to read one chapter???? I will be catching up today and then adding my two cents to the discussion.
I just realized that last week I only read through Chapter 7 instead of 9, but this week I caught up. I enjoyed the assigned reading, but think I liked the last weeks chapters a bit better. I’m compiling my post now, but it really struck me how much Hemingways seemed to enjoy writing about the way the women he met were built! Kinda sexist, but then it was the 1920s.
I finished ‘Western Lit Survival Guide’ and this book was one of the many TBR notes I made. I’ll get it at the Library, because Bill said it is the only Hemingway he hasn’t read.
I’m very keen to read this book sometime, it must be such an interesting window to 1920s Paris.