A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway is the March Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. By an unfortunate series of events, I had to cancel the actual moveable feast as my wife was having a procedure done in preparation for Chemotherapy. The plan was to go crabbing and then have a seafood boil afterwards.
I was introduced to the seafood boil in South Carolina, named the ‘low country boil’. It is sausage, corn on the cob, small boiling potatoes and some kind of regional seafood. We were planning on catching a couple local Dungeness crabs and feasting out. I have come to learn that there are many different versions using crawdads or lobsters or soft shelled crabs depending on what is available regionally.
A Moveable Feast was published posthumously and featured Hemingway’s years in Paris and some of France. It is really a series of writings that he made while he was there and tucked away in his belongings to be discovered after he died. As a result, it is kind of a incongruous set of chapters with different interactions of the period.
Hemingway served in World War I and kind of fell in love with Europe. He spent roughly 1921-1927 living in Paris as a result. While he was there, he tended to rub shoulders with all of the expatriates that were also there. The chapters were some of those interactions with people like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. By proximity and scene, he also befriended people like Pablo Picasso as well.
Hemingway was an interesting dichotomy. On one hand, he was an artist. He had passion, partied hard and loved hard. On the other hand, he was a man’s man interested in hunting and fishing and bull fighting. Clearly, he was worldly choosing Paris and Cuba for a lot of his life, but ending it in Idaho (literally).
I wouldn’t call myself a Hemingway fan per se but I definitely prefer him to many and most of the contemporary classic writers. I think about The Old Man and the Sea or The Sun Also Rises and remember not hating it like some of the others we read. But, I have to say that this book felt like a money grab. There was no real story, just anecdotes of his run ins with cronies. And not really interesting at that.
I believe that it is called Moveable Feast because nearly all of the chapters center around Ernest at a cafe and talking about writing or talking with other artists. They seemed to have a bit here, then move somewhere else all kind of dreaming and scheming about the work.
This isn’t a culinary book but there is plenty of food and drink in it. Beer, wine, cocktails and coffee flow freely as well. I proposed that if the book offended the senses of the hard-core cookbook readers of the group, they could also check out the PBS series of the same name. That I could get behind. I love Americana and people passionate about what they do.
End Your Programming Routine: My recommendation on this one is skip. If you are extremely interested in the life of Hemingway, then maybe this is your cup of tea. I simply did not find enough value in the book to recommend. I still want to have the seafood boil, but that will likely have to wait until after all of this cancer stuff. For now, I can keep on reading while I play the support role.
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