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

A Moveable Feast, which Ernest Hemingway wrote between 1957 and 1960, is a collection of vignettes describing his early life as a budding writer in Paris from 1921 to 1926. Several of Hemingway's equally famous contemporaries populate the book, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford, and his unflinchingly honest portrayals of these often very quirky personalities make for some of the more interesting parts.* Aside from the colorful cast of eccentric writers, there is also Hemingway's first wife, his infant son Mr. Bumby, and F. Puss, the cat. (the latter two are only mentioned several times in passing, but they stand out in my mind as intriguing characters nonetheless.)

Apart from the various character sketches and adventures, it's a book about the craft; about being a writer in a city that was made for writers, and about the discipline of writing itself, for which Hemingway seemed to think he had discovered the perfect regimen. All in all, it makes for inspiring reading if you have any sort of literary ambitions, and all the more so if you happen to share Hemingway's nostalgic love for Paris.

* Pound being the notable exception; apparently he had no quirks other than being just a really nice guy.**

** Well, and a fascist, as the node on Ezra Pound informs me. But that was later on.

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