a moveable feast
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.
Ernest Hemingway
to a friend, 1950
I haven't read much that isn't baby or triplet related since I found out I was having triplets. My reading time has gone way down. When I was pregnant, I was either too sick or too stressed to even concentrate and now I'm too busy, too stressed, or I just haven't had the time to get to the library.
The books I did read while I was on bedrest were: The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir, The Sun also Rises by Hemingway, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, and I was about 1/3 into All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren when the babies were born. David's reading it now, so I'll finish it when he's done.
The Blood of Others was one of my favorite books in college. I read it multiple times. I enjoyed re-reading it, but it was very different than I remembered it. The writing was self-indulgent and the characters kind of annoying. The ideas behind the plot were interesting, but the main character is almost paralyzed by his fear of interfering with someone else's life and it wasn't believable. Like, get over yourself. The idea of whose blood do you spill and whose do you save is an interesting and even powerful concept, and I found it thought-provoking in terms of war (it's placed in Paris before and during WWII), but in terms of relationships, it was crazy. You don't spend your life with someone out of pity, and you don't spurn someone to stay uninvolved. You love who you love. At least when you are young and unattached and deciding those things. I thought it was interesting too, that her lead male character was so complex and her lead female character was so two-dimensional. I know the idea was that the girl grew and changed and became more than she was, but you don't really see it until she is on her deathbed (that's not a spoiler because she is on her deathbed on page 1 and the rest of the book is written in flashbacks).
The Sun also Rises was a fabulous re-read. I've read this book at least three times before. I completely enjoyed it, but I felt differently about the characters this time around too. I was never rooting for Brett and Jake to get together. The whole book came together for me more this time, seeing Brett with the right eyes. She was beautiful, but weak and selfish and the ending was right.
I remember Crime and Punishment as a quick and interesting read. It was interesting again, but it was also painful, like a gruesome car wreck that you do not want to look at. Good, but I don't think I will re-read it again for awhile.
The Great Gatsby was the best of my re-reads. It was wonderfully written and the characters were as I remembered them and it was more interesting than I remembered. (I'm starting to run out of steam with writing this, but I want to at least get down my general impressions).
I won't write about All the King's Men until I actually finish it, but so far, so good. It was the only book in the house that I picked up during my pregnancy that I hadn't read before.
A few weeks ago, I finished A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway and the book was a feast. He writes about living in Paris with his new wife and young baby. He tells about his friendships with Gertrude Stein (which was very interesting for me as an art history major) and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The details were fascinating and left me wanting more information. It's funny because I felt like I was dipped back into Paris in the 20's and there's this mental setup I do in my mind when I read a book about the 20's that has just a little to do with what the author is actually writing, but I think was shaped in the first place by Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
The book is nonfiction, kind of. Hemingways says in the preface: "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction." I don't know what that means, but I imagine it's due to the fact that he finished the book in 1960 but wrote out scenes with full dialogue and some of that had to be re-created in a way that is not exact.
The book has a sad ending because he tells how he he had an affair with another woman and hints at the end of his marriage and his regret is palpable. I've read most of Hemingway's fiction, but I've never been that interested in his real life. The fact that he destroyed his first marriage and that he died of a suicide just seemed so sad and so real to me, I cried when I put the book down.
