Talk Back

[Eisworth]

The title comes from one of Hemingway's letters:

"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 shell-shocked from The Ambassadors, I picked up this book to get another version of Paris written by someone whose style is the antithesis of Henry James. I plunged through the book in a single afternoon - I compare the exerience to the feeling one gets after removing 10 lb ankle-weights after walking around with them for two weeks.

The book is a collection of short vignettes taken from Hemingway's time in Paris in the 1920's --- a Paris inhabited by Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce among others. We get wonderful anecdotes about the community of expatriate writers working at the time --- Gertrude Stein explaining to Hemingway why he shouldn't hate homosexuals, F. Scott Fitzgerald broken up because his wife Zelda told him that his penis was too small, etc. (The whole picture of Zelda sabotaging Scott's writing out of jealousy sis one of the saddest things in the book.)

I thought the book captured a lot of the energy of that time and place.
It's well worth reading; it made this middle-aged plump mathematician wish he were a young man trying to earn his living by writing in the City of Lights.
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Todd Eisworth
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Ohio University