A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition by Ernest Hemingway

A review by Steve Paul

In the last paragraph of the possible last chapter of the last book Ernest Hemingway struggled to finish before taking his own life, the great writer reiterates that he had mined the remises, or storage places "of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist."

The line strikes me as an exceptionally poignant moment in the newly released "Restored Edition" of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's fictionalized memoir of life in Paris in the early 1920s.

And, as is typical of Hemingway, you may find much below the surface of the sentence to ponder. Which has been tampered with -- his heart or his memory? -- and which no longer exists?

It's April 1961. Hemingway a few months earlier had undergone electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Soon he'd attempt suicide, and less than three months after writing that last paragraph, he would succeed in the act, dying of a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head.

If anything, as ...

• Read the entire review
• More reviews from Kansas City Star

More Than Three Decades of Quality Writing and Criticism

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, honors outstanding writing and fosters a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. To learn about how to join, click here.