April in Paris

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.