Reading Hemingway

I recently finished The Paris Wife by Paula McLain.  It's a fictional memoir in the voice of Ernest Hemingway's first wife Hadley.  It has a fantastic setting, 1920s Paris, and a fascinating cast list (Gertrude Stein & Alice B Toklas, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, etc.).  McLain's Hadley is a sympathetic character and her love and support for Hemingway and anguish at losing him are movingly portrayed.

Reading The Paris Wife has inspired me to have another go at reading Hemingway.  The only Hemingway I've read was The Old Man and the Sea which I read a few years ago when I was on holiday in Cuba. To be honest I preferred Our Man in Havana which was my other choice of suitably themed reading that holiday.

I did, however, see an adaptation of The Sun Also Rises at the Edinburgh International Festival last year.  It was by experimental American theatre company, the Elevator Repair Service, who are known for their six hour word-for-word version of The Great Gatsby.  Fortunately The Sun Also Rises was abridged to a mere three hours forty minutes, but my heart did sink when I realised what I had let myself in for after blithely agreeing to go with a friend (it's not often I get a night out so I said yes first and checked out the production second).  I was surprised that I really enjoyed its depiction of the self-destructive characters against the backdrop of bull-fighting.  I was fascinated to read, in The Paris Wife, about the real life events on which the novel was based.

So I've ordered A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's own memoir of his Paris years, from the library.  And I may just give The Sun Also Rises a go as well.