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A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
New York : Scribner, 2010.
xvi, 240 p., [14] p. of plates : ill., ports., facsimiles ; 23 cm

I've wanted to read this book for a while, especially since I added this new "restored edition" to the collection about five years ago, to replace our very old edition that was first published posthumously in 1964.

It is not a single narrative (or meal) but more like a buffet of Hemingway's Paris between the wars with interesting sections touching on writers such as Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Stein; living conditions for expats, early marriage, fatherhood, and the work of a struggling writer moving from journalism to fiction.

Some might find the discontinuous nature of the sections off-putting, but I found it quite wonderful.  Each section is interesting in its own right, and the collection as a whole leaves you satisfied, but curious for more Hemingway.

I would definitely recommend this book for any student interested in Hemingway, or in literary Paris in the 1920s.

Bleak and Beautiful

The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz
New York : Anchor Books, 2008, c1984
158 p. ; 21 cm.

Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, and this little gem of a novel gives an example of why.

It is the tale of a man emerging from four years of harsh and humiliating imprisonment, only to find that his wife and her new lover are the ones who betrayed him to the police, and that his criminal mentor is a hypocrite and a man of means and power.   Bent on revenge, Said Mahran ends up destroying the only treasure he has left, his humanity.

In it's short, but intense meditation on the human spirit, this novel reminds me of another Nobel laureates fine little novel, Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.

I really appreciated this novel of set in 1950s Egypt.  It is straightforward, compelling, and easy to finish, but leaves you with a lot to sit back and think about.

Horse Fatigue

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
New York : Vintage Books, 1995, c1994.
425 p. ; 21 cm.

I liked the beginnings of this novel a lot.  The main character Billy, a young man, gets involved in the trapping of a wolf and his attempt to return it to its range, a quest which leads him on a coming of age journey as he wrestles with the ferocious forces of nature and the sometimes kind and sometimes dangerous/savage forces of the human world.

This second novel of the "Border Trilogy" moves from being a powerful story of a young man and his quest to release a she wolf - into a repetitive and gloomier repeat of his All the Pretty Horses, the first book in the is "Border Trilogy." His next quest involves he and his younger brother seeking the horses stolen from his murdered family and the subsequent sufferings and tragedies they experience.

I enjoy the high style of McCarthy, but after a while I just started to grow weary with it.

If you love McCarthy, you will probably enjoy the novel, but I felt like it could have been far shorter and would have been more powerful if it had been.

a poet 'swonder full i fe!

Self Portrait by e.e. cummings 

at the National Portrait Gallery

E. E. Cummings: a poet's life by Catherine Reef
New York : Clarion Books, c2006.
149 p. : ill. ; 26 cm.

Finishing up April, National Poetry Month, with this biography of the famous US poet, e.e. cummings, seemed like a good idea.  And it was!  Reef has put together a wonderful and accessible biography of Cummings.  I really appreciated that Reef manages to present a lot of information in a manageable number of pages - and yet really develops a fascinating portrait of Cummings as a truly unique artist and human being.

I was really struck by how original Cummings was.  His poetry still has a freshness and vitality, but must have seemed stunningly unique when he published it. Reef also gives attention to Cummings serious work as a painter (as the self-portrait above reveals).

Reef also conveys what an original Cummings was in so many ways.  Though from a very conventional family, he rebelled by moving to Greenwich Village, volunteering to be an ambulance driver in WWI, traveling widely abroad, championing avant-garde artists (e.g. the Armory Show artists).

Reef manages to convey the various milieus that defined Cummings' life - WWI, the 1920s, WWII, the New Deal, etc.  She also brings Cummings to life as a man of great dedication, passion, talent, wit, playfulness and (yes) love - and all in the space of 149 pages enlivened with wonderful photographs and illustrations.

I would definitely recommend this book to any student curious about E. E. Cummings specifically or the life of an artist and writer generally.