Why this Book:  My literature reading group selected it as a companion piece to The Paris Wife, since both are about Hemingway’s experiences living in Paris during the 1920s. The Paris Wife is a novel based on the experiences of Hemingway’s first wife, and A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s own story of his experiences during that same period.

My Impressions. This book prepared by Hemingway during his final years, was published after his death, and was edited by his family and others, all of which may explain why it doesn’t feel like the other meatier Hemingway works I’ve read.  When Hemingway was preparing this in his last years, using notes and notebooks from thirty years earlier, he was probably running out of gas. This book doesn’t have the energy of his other writings.   To me it seemed like  a collection of autobiographical short stories about things that had happened to him a long time ago.  These stories, as chapters, ‘sort of’ hang together, but each can be read almost independently of the others.

While written in Hemingway’s classic sparse style, they didn’t seem to me to have been written to be a book.  Reading the Wikipedia article on the book I learn that indeed Hemingway had intended these stories to be a book – he had by chance recovered notebooks of stories and anecdotes he had written during his time in Paris in the 1920s, and worked on them off and on up until shortly before he took his own life, to make them into what became A Moveable Feast. 

It is not his best work – and my guess is that late in life, with little energy or inspiration to do anything new, he was willing to publish these stories, knowing that his name and notoriety would probably make the book of interest and probably profitable.  My recommendation is to read this book only as part of a study of Hemingway, who he was in the 1920s, and one can read the chapters separately without losing much.  I also wouldn’t recommend reading A Moveable Feast until or unless one has read several other of Hemingway works, most importantly The Sun Also Rises written during his time in Paris.  I would also read The Paris Wife first.   I would also suggest the Wikipedia article and perhaps some other analyses of  A Moveable Feast  to help better understand the background, context,  and intent of this book, Hemingway’s last published piece.  There continues to be some controversy around apparent edits to Hemingway’s draft in what finally became the published version, by his wife Mary, and grand son Sean.