Library bloggers shouldn’t introduce themselves with
confessions of major books and authors they’ve ignored, but in this
case I’ve got to come clean. Me and Hemingway? Not a match made in
heaven. Tried a few times and never clicked. The old adage about too
many books and not enough time kicked in, and I never looked back.
Perhaps that’s why I kept pushing Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife,
historical fiction about Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, to the back
burner. Last year I purchased it for a friend who has a Parisian flair
for living and dressing and even floated the idea to my book club.
Somehow the book never landed in my hands, but I knew one day it would
come to me.
And then in April it arrived---and conquered me
totally. In the midst of this year’s balmy, early Bethel spring, I had
my own April in Paris.
The Paris Wife, first and foremost, is a love
story. Hadley Richardson, a woman in her late 20s who seems destined to
become the Miss Lonely Hearts of St. Louis, meets 21-year old Ernest
Hemingway. Dashing, clever and fresh from his physical and emotional WWI
wounds, the young writer discovers his muse in Hadley and falls in
love. The two marry and begin a life, that for the next five years,
carries them to the glittering arts scene in Paris, bullfights in Spain,
skiing in Austria, picnics in the south of France.
You know that Hadley--the first Mrs. Hemingway--- is just
that. His first wife. And Hemingway had four. Number two shows up in
the last third of the book, and Hadley’s reactions to her and the demise
of her marriage left me unsettled and angry. She deserved so much more,
but rarely asserted herself the way I hoped.
How do any of us handle love when it’s fading or manage
emotions when we want to keep fighting for our first love, our family,
our way of life? It’s a question that you’ll ask yourself as you read.
I loved this book, and I found Hadley to be a woman who
could have been my friend. Sometimes her decisions frustrated me, but at
her core she was kind, smart, accomplished and most accommodating to
Ernest. Had I been there 90 years ago, sipping a café crème along the
Parisian sidewalks, I would have told her to walk away from him sooner.
Read this book, imagine yourself amongst the bistros and
salons with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and tell me what you would
have said to this Paris wife. I’d like to know.
The Push From the Book
Each book we read leaves its mark and gives
you a push: a new way of thinking, a new take on life, new ideas, new
goals. Here’s what this book did to me:I’m going to try
Hemingway again. “Papa’s” daring behavior in Spain, jumping into the
bullring for a close brush with hooves and horns, for example, and his
circle of friends whom he invited to the bullfights, were the grist for The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first, and some say best, novel . His memoir of his early days in Paris, The Moveable Feast, is also on my radar. You can be certain that I’ll be thinking of Hadley while I read.
I also believe I need to see Paris. Sooner rather than later.
