A Moveable Feast by Ernest HemingwayRead about another entry on the list.
Who wouldn’t want to live—and eat—in Paris of the 1920s? The closest we can get now is through Hemingway’s dashing account of this time and place in A Moveable Feast. He’s not writing just about food, but about the sustenance a vibrant atmosphere gives: “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.” Still, there’s plenty of good eating in this book. “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away,” Hemingway writes, “leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
A Moveable Feast made Olivia Laing's ten best list of books and stories on drinking and booze, Katherine Monasterio's top five list of incredible tales of Paris’s past and present, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on Americans in Paris, Neil Pearson's six best books list, Diana Souhami's top ten list of "books about Paris and London lesbians in the early 20th century", Laura Landro's five best list of books about travel; it is a book to which Russell Banks always returns.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
