A Movable Feast

I realized that I have only done one non-fiction so far, so I chose Ernest Hemingway’s 'A movable Feast' which actually, I read this summer. I was in a bookstore on a trip with my grandmother, who was already becoming suspicious of the quality of books I read (shed spotted my Sandman graphic novel) and when I held up Sedaris's 'When you are engulfed in flames' hopefully, she decided officially that id been reading 'immoral books' and cleaned the store out of its Hemingway selection. I don’t really know what her reasoning behind that was, but I know better than to argue with it. She later found out I had read 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand and was pleased, so I have to wonder if by 'immoral' she might have meant 'unimpressive'. The purpose of this paragraph is not to question my grandmother’s motives, as it may seem, but to explain that I really would never have read any Hemingway at all if my grandmother had not, um, 'encouraged' it.

So I started reading movable feast without a lot of anticipation, but once I opened it, I actually didn’t put it down. I read it in one afternoon, because Hemingway is an easy guy to read. Not easy as in unchallenging, easy as in very good. Probably it was all the hype, but he just struck me as a really great writer. Also, as the most impressive drinker EVER. And kind-of annoyingly self righteous, but GREAT WRITER. I think. A movable feast is a Hemingway’s auto biography of the time he spent in Paris with his first wife, his 'starving artist' years, although it has been proved that he was well off during those years.

The truth is, I’m still unsure of how I feel about this book. First off, I really don’t feel qualified to judge Hemingway on any level, and second off...He annoyed me. His writing didn’t annoy me, but the oh-so-effective and descriptive prose didn’t do much for me when I wasn’t sure about the main character. Literally, Hemingway himself annoyed me.
Maybe I’m just sore about how he treated F.Scott Fitzgerald, whose characterization I for some reason became attached to during the book.

This is probably the most superficial book review of any Hemingway novel ever, but what I really came away with was a sense of awe and disbelief in Hemingway’s drinking ability, and love for the title itself 'A Movable Feast', a very creative and beautiful metaphor for Paris.