11 August 2010

He Said She Said

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." - Ernest HemingwayEnvelope of a letter Ernest Hemingway sent (1924) from Paris to his parents at their summer home in Michigan.

6 comments:

  1. i don't know, i try to keep an open mind, but every time i make an attempt to crack the sun also rises, the only hemingway book i have, i just get the sense that he's an anti-semite, a homophobe, and a misogynist to boot.

    sorry but i just have to put it down...

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  2. no, that's a tad anti-intellectual, which goes against everything i believe in. and guess what, i happened to be in a bookstore today & so i picked up a copy of a moveable feast.

    i'm gonna give papa hemingway another chance to disprove all the rather unsavoury things i suspected him of...

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  3. Anon: You are generous indeed. I can't find this book book 'a moveable feast' at all! Which bookstore???

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  4. i bought it at an MPH branch, so it should be quite widely available. it's the 2009 'restored edition', edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway; and it seems that he corrected & expanded quite a bit on the original 1964 posthumous edition put out by Papa's 4th wife, Mary Hemingway.

    anyhow i was glad to read in the introduction that the Hemingway family now finally admit his death as suicide, rather than 'accidental' death by firearm, which the family insisted on for many years. it seems that things were so bad at one point that he actually had electro-shock therapy in the late 50s (which was really quite brutal back in those days, unlike now). and the treatment affected his memory, which in turn impacted on the writing of this memoir. quite tragic.

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  5. Anon: you're quite the hemingway fan despite claiming to hate hemingway! ha! electro-shock therapy these days would be considered 'rejuvenation' LOL... and perhaps this is why my memory is so bad these days.

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