In-Review: L’été à Paris

Thu, Jun 21st, 2012 by Jane Cobb

“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

This is the summer that my daughter, Grace, experiences Hemingway’s “moveable feast.” Through her university’s study abroad program, Grace is finishing up her bachelor’s degree in Paris this summer, and because of the Instagraming, Facebooking, Skyping world that we live in, I’m able to watch, like a fly on the social media wall. I wake up in the morning and wonder where I’ll find Waldo today. Will she be at the Louvre? Monet’s Garden? Perhaps she’ll be in front of the Van Goghs at the Musée d’Orsay. Maybe picnicking at the Luxembourg Gardens. Needless to say that these days, Grace and Paris are both on my mind.

So in keeping with all things Parisian, here are a couple of titles that you might want to consider for your summer reading. The first one, I’ve read; the second is on my own “to read” list this summer – that is, after I catch up on Grace’s most recent escapades.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is a personal stroll through his life in Paris in the 1920’s. Hemingway’s anecdotes of himself as a young man and his relationships with such contemporary notables as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce chronicle the intellectual and artistic mood of the age set against the backdrop of Paris following World War I.

Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife is the fictionalized story and romance between Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson. McLain explains, “I think the way it occurred to me at the time, and perhaps I was fooling myself, was that I was in conversation with that book [A Moveable Feast] and that I was inserting my version of Hadley into that time and talking about their places and their experiences from her point of view. I was giving her an opportunity to step into the light for a moment, out of the fringes of literary history.”

Au revoir, and happy reading!

Jane Beaulieu Cobb lives in the Pensacola area with her husband Chris where they have raised/are raising their six children. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of West Florida in English/Writing. Aside from working as business manager for Cobb Woodworking, LLC, Janie enjoys reading, writing, gardening, running, and living in the overall chaos that is the Cobb household. She is a VIE contributor for “The Written Word” column.

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