Reader’s Corner: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein’s Ford. Anyway he had not been serieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The patron had said to him, “You are all a génération perdue.”
― Ernest Hemmingway, A Moveable Feast
A transformative window into the art which forms humanity, Ernest Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast demonstrates the epitome of what memoir has to offer. Through his lyrical prose, Hemingway recites his experiences of 1920s Paris in an almost unbelievably ambiguous manner, creating through his learned experience and his talent as a writer a perfect microcosm of humanity in the bubble of his life.
The memoir consists of a series of vignettes from Hemmingway’s experience as a young struggling artist in Paris in the 1920s, and reflects on his interactions with other authors, painters, and artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. These artists of the so-called “Lost Generation” balance Hemmingway’s personal history and the broader artistic ambition which he followed, forming a narrative both demonstrative of the author himself and of the larger social and artistic world of his time.
Vibrant, introspective, and full of characters supremely real, both literally and in the unique spirit which Hemmingway embeds in his writing, the narrative reflects the importance of artistic discipline, growth, and influence. Written in his later years, Hemingway’s reflection on his transition from an emerging writer to the literary giant he is known as now is a perfect testament to the importance of authorship, acting as evidence of literature’s ability to capture moments, memory and the search for beauty in a bittersweet and disillusioned life.