Reviews of Hemingway's Moveable Feast usually focus on the deeply cruel portraits of Hemingway's emigre circle of artists -- not unfairly, especially considering the F. Scott Fitzgerald anecdotes. Papa eats his old friends and acquaintances alive in this one.
But what people don't seem to focus on is the amount to which Hem eats himself up -- he just tears through his Paris years in a wave of cynicism. And yet, despite this, there's an undercurrent of nostalgia for his simpler days, before he wised up and learned what an ass he and everybody else was. Ah, sweet memories.
I think it's unsettling that these stories are so unattached to the author's present; there's no rationale for them, just a free-floating bitterness that forces him to recast his earlier happinesses as if they were a kind of gullibility or blindness.
Don't get me wrong. The gossip's hot and vicious, and, at the end of the day, it's still Papa H: I think I'm genetically predisposed to really love his writing no matter what.
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