dhyune

Since I read this I've heard a criticism - that his writing style in Feast is like a caricature of itself. However, other than some Nick Adams stories, I've never read anything else by him, so it doesn't matter to me. Feast has many bright lights, full of werewolves in their youth doing the inadvisable and saying the preposterous. I love Hemingway's descriptions of what it's like to be hungry in Paris - to have to escape to the park during lunch time because you can't afford a meal, because everywhere else you walk smells too good, and how the hunger brings a sharp clarity of the senses. I love the haughty Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway's sweet wife and infant son. The author always seems to be drinking chilled white wine. This is the ultimate romance - to be a writer in Paris, bound for greatness. Later in this memoir Hemingway starts punching you in the stomach. He foreshadows the end of his first marriage, his youth and his innocence. You'll be lying on the couch reading and come to the end of a chapter: "It was then that I knew that Zelda Fitzgerald was insane." Rest the open book face down on your chest and look at the ceiling, and breath out. "My God, Hemingway, I know it."

2020-08-30 08:50