Paris - a festival for life

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Hemingway in Paris around 1924

Paris - A feast for life are memories of the American writer Ernest Hemingway , which appeared posthumously in 1964 under the English title A Moveable Feast . Hemingway largely describes his life in Paris between 1921 and 1926 . In the foreword he leaves open how fictional the short stories are. The memories are arranged chronologically and partly build on one another. The book was written between 1957 and 1960, shortly before Hemingway's death. In the penultimate story he announced "long after the Second World War" to an old Parisian friend that he would write down these memories.

The warm-hearted portrayal of the city of Paris, encounters with other writers, traveling and the difficult financial situation after Hemingway's decision to no longer work as a journalist are recurring motifs .

Stylistically noteworthy are detailed descriptions of seemingly incidental matters, lively but often not in-depth dialogues and elliptical jumps. With these means Hemingway creates a dense atmosphere. He shows himself to be a precise observer who expresses his impressions without judging.

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In the story A good café on Place Saint-Michel , Hemingway portrays the first cold winter rain. The hygienic conditions around Hemingway's hotel are poor.

In Miss Stein teaches , Hemingway returns from the mountains to Paris and finds everything in perfect order. His hotel room can be heated, and the price for the firewood is affordable. The writing goes on. Together with his wife Hadley, when he is not writing, he visits Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, above the Jardin du Luxembourg . Miss Stein explains to Hemingway how to write. In addition, Hemingway reports on the context in which Gertrude Stein coined the now famous name Lost Generation .

In People on the Seine, Hemingway praises the fishing men. However, he doesn't even unpack his gear on the Seine because he wants to fish in Spain.

A goatherd's customer lives in Hemingway's house in A Deceptive Spring . The shepherd comes by with his flock and fills the customer's mug.

In Hungern Was a Good School , Hemingway's amazement that Germany is the only country where he can sell his works is told. To be precise, to the Frankfurter Zeitung as well as Hermann von Wedderkop and the magazine Der Cross- Section , which he published .

In the story The Man Who Was Marked by Death , Hemingway is visited by the poet Ernest Walsh and two girls with him. All three come to France by steamer directly from the States . One of the girls asks Hemingway if he lives in a poor neighborhood. Hemingway replies that he can manage by writing and betting on racecourses. Indeed, these are the two main occupations of Hemingway - with the exception of the third: Together with his beloved wife, he enjoys life in every conceivable way. Although he is mostly poor, he goes to cafes, eats in restaurants and travels to the Alps in winter. But every now and then he tells his wife, who is waiting at home with baby Mr. Bumby and the cat F. Puss , just how extensively he ate while he was actually walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg and starving.

A weightless serenity pervades the stories of the book, which Hemingway tells not only about his good friends Ezra Pound , Gertrude Stein and in great detail about Scott Fitzgerald . It is also written how the poet TS Eliot was helped from Paris and how Hemingway had a brief conversation with James Joyce .

expenditure

  • Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1964. (first edition)
In German: Paris - a festival for life. Translation by Annemarie Horschitz-Horst, Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1965.

Adaptations

Episodes from these memoirs were filmed in 1988 by Alan Rudolph under the title The Moderns .

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