I read A Moveable Feast earlier this year as part of my Nobel literature project. (I read Old Man and the Sea in high school and A Farewell to Arms in college, but I’d want to revisit them before writing anything about them.) I read A Moveable Feast in Paris, where I was living a five-minute walk or so from 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, the address of Hemingway’s first apartment there. Needless to say, the fifth arrondissement is a bit different from the run-down, rat-infested neighborhood he describes. It was a lot of fun to read that book while I was learning the neighborhood, from the Luxembourg Gardens to the very establishments where Hemingway would write over a café crème or oysters and sancerre while his poor wife was trying to keep their baby alive in their frigid apartment.
This year my patience for male entitlement reached new lows. I was able to enjoy this book in part because of the setting and in part because Hemingway doesn’t come off as a saint. His flaws are all there in the open, not least his fixation on the size of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s genitalia, and there was something cathartic about seeing how poorly he came off. (It doesn’t hurt that, for all his toxic masculinity, the man could sure write a sentence.) I think I maxed out on Hemingway, though, when I read The Sun Also Rises. It was just too aggressive, too callous, too male. I may revisit Hemingway again someday, perhaps when there are fewer toxic, entitled men in government, media, and every other industry, when women aren’t routinely pushed out of their careers by sexism and harassment. In the meantime, there are a lot of other good books to read.
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