A beautiful way for an American to discover Paris is by reading Hemingway’s restored edition of A Moveable Feast (Simon & Shuster 2009). You’ll find streets, restaurants, drinks and even a bookstore that exist to the day. But there’s more.
Blame his death on the alcohol. The electroshocks. Sheer exhaustion, or the depression. Blame it on the FBI? When Mary, Hemingway’s wife, called the writer’s closest friend Aaron Edward Hotchner on July 2, 1961, she informed “Hotch” that Ernest Hemingway died accidentally, cleaning his gun. Hotch’s biography about Hemingway, written five years after the shotgun was fired at the Ketchum, Idaho chalet, was met with shock when wrote that his friend was consumed by paranoia and ultimately killed himself. And so the biography set a truth that was believed for fifty years.
Last summer however, Hotch wrote in a moving letter published in The New York Times 
that the FBI is in part responsible for the writer’s death. In an interview with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur he states that during their time together, Hemingway saw FBI agents everywhere. He was sure they were following him. Hotch and his friend would often leave restaurants in the middle of a meal, so as to not be followed. It was not until the late ‘80s, when several FBI files were made public thanks to the Freedom Information Act, that pages dedicated to Hemingway’s activities were unveiled. The FBI had been tracking the man from 1952 until his death. Hemingway had been right all along.
After watching Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, I felt the urge to read A Moveable Feast again. Because of the fondness I now feel for Hemingway, and the character I enjoyed in the movie, it was as if I was reading the novel for the first time.
The novel takes us back to Paris in the ‘20s, where the 1954 Nobel laureate lived with his wife. Hemingway quit his job as a journalist, his only source of income. He takes us on walks by the Seine, from bar to bar, to horse races, and sometimes a fancy restaurant. We witness fantastic conversations with the expatriate community: intellectuals such as the art enthusiast and writer Gertrude Stein, the hypochondriac F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the lovable Ezra Pound.
Knowing that this work of fiction was the last the Hemingway worked on, under the conditions that we now know, is moving to me. As a young author his concern for the “true” word, “Write the truest sentence that you know;” and his passion for books and reading are traits we recognize in him. I was particularly touched by the goatherd and his herd selling milk in the streets of Paris: “The goatherd chose one of the heavy-bagged black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while the dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk.”
By Alfredo Orrego
