Book Review #14 - The Paris Wife

I have read one Ernest Hemingway book:  For Whom The Bell Tolls.  I liked it well enough but it was hard reading.  Short, curt sentences.  Bleak.  Unemotional.  Plus, there was a lot of formal spanish dialogue.

Reading about Hemingway was much simpler and more my cup of tea.  I know novels are never as accurate as biographies or wikipedia articles (joke) but their delivery is so much more palatable, in my opinion.  Novels that aren’t written by Hemingway, that is.

The Paris wife is a novelized account of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, and the years they lived in Paris before and during his rise to literature stardom.  I found Hadley and Ernest Hemingway and their relationship as depicted in The Paris Wife to be quite believable.  They felt like whole people to me.  Both were flawed, Ernest far more so, but as we were told the story through Hadley’s perspective, it felt right to see her as more of the victim of an ambitious and selfish man.

What a time period!  I admit, I watched Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and barely enjoyed it.  Not knowing any of the legends depicted except the most famous (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Porter), I didn’t finish that movie with a sense that life in Paris during the 20s was all that spectacular.  This book both confirmed and corrected my attitude.  Paris was filled with what would become the all-stars of American Literature.  It was an interesting time in an interesting place.  The Great War, World War I, had recently ended.  Many of those living in Paris either fought in the war or witnessed its atrocities.  The world was recovering from what probably nobody thought could have ever happened.  So much death.  So much destruction.  So little reason.  Thus, the free and lose values of these young and provocative artists created an atmosphere almost akin to the Renaissance.  It was another rebirth.

The rebirth came at a cost, however.  Drugs, sexual promiscuity and an enlarged sense of lasses-faire may have created epic works of art and timeless literature, but it ripped away any kind of foundation for family life.  Hadley Hemingway learned this the humiliating and painful way as her husband’s ego and success grew.

What detracted from the book were the rushed histories on both ends of the main story.  Hadley’s childhood, while certainly necessary to understand her character, felt one-dimensional.  Her younger self barely looked like her married self.  Likewise, the tidying up at the end with both her and Ernests’s later histories satisfied some curiosity but, again, didn’t match up.  I ended up reading wikipedia to get more explanation.  :)

An interesting story of marriage, however.  Fascinating really.