A Moveable Feast - Chapitre Deux

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Scapegoat by Daniel Pennac was a disappointment. I gave up after just a couple of chapters. I had no idea what was going on and didn't feel compelled to sort anything out.

I wanted to comment on the final chapters of A Moveable Feast. The stories about F. Scott Fitzgerald are très triste. Hemingway paints him as being rather a hypochondriac and in the early stages of his alcoholism. His wife Zelda loved to party and was jealous of Scotty's work so she pulled him along with her. He would resist for a bit and get some writing done, but then fall under the spell of the drink and was unable to work until he would resist again and then fall again.

But Hemingway loved him and they were good friends.

The final pages of the book are heartbreaking: Hemingway and Hadley and why that marriage ended and how. He is writing of their relationship from some distance of time and place and has great insight into its end. I felt as if he were heartbroken still.

I wondered often as I read these vignettes and stories if they would have been just as interesting if the characters were not so well known. I had to answer, mais oui. Hemingway's writing is what gives them their power, not the names.

"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other."

Deux livres

I had fun yesterday nosing around my library's e-book collection for French mysteries. I came across a series by Cara Black starring her reluctant investigator Aimée Leduc. Aimée, whose father was a flic killed by a terrorist bomb, runs a computer security firm in Paris with her partner, a dwarf named René.

Th first book in the series is Murder in the Marais which I remember starting to read some time ago and putting aside. I couldn't get that one so I downloaded the second in the series Murder in Belleville.  After reading quite a bit of it last night I remember why I put aside the first book. How could these books not be engaging? Paris...a female detective...a female author...what is not to like? Actually there is quite a lot not to like. Everything seems just a bit too forced. The characters, the dialogue, the action.

I am seriously disappointed.

It is always good to have a backup book and I came across a French writer, Daniel Pennac. He has quite a few mysteries out in translation (known as The Malaussene Saga) and my wonderful library had his first titled The Scapegoat (Au Bonheur des Ogres). I braved the heat today and I have that one in hand hoping it will make me laugh and present a pretty Parisian puzzle at the same time.