Ernest Hemingway's a Moveable Feast: The Making of Myth

Examines Hemingway's methods of self-mythologizing and argues that the anecdotes in "A Moveable Feast" were written shortly before his death, not in the 1920s as he claimed

John Barth once said, "The story of your life is not your life. It is your story." Hemingway himself gave us the wink in his introduction to A Moveable Feast , saying, "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction." Just how many of his remembrances of the expatriate heaven called Paris were false and whether he was a young or old man when he wrote them have always been matters of speculation among aficionados. Opening with the statement " A Moveable Feast is clearly a reconstruction of the past rather than a recollection of it," Tavernier-Courbin proceeds to give readers a detailed account of the book's construction from conception and creation to posthumous editing and publication. Though the subject is covered to some extent in Michael Reynolds's Hemingway: The Paris Years; A Writer's Life ( LJ 11/15/89) and more specifically in Ronald Weber's Hemingway's Art of Non-Fiction ( LJ 2/15/90), the treatment here is much more in-depth than in either of those fine titles. Tavernier-Courbin's material is well researched and documented, making it a competent addition to Hemingway scholarship. Academic libraries specializing in American literature will want to add it to their collections.
- Michael Rogers, "Library Journal "
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.