Saturday Morning Reading with The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
“There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”
A quote from Hemingway, in The Paris Wife. This book was selected for one of my book clubs – and boy am I glad we picked it. Paula McLain, the author, really creates a wonderful historical fictitious tale of Hadley Richardson and her life with Ernest Hemingway.
Scene set up: Chicago 1920, a sheltered Hadley meets energetic and not-well-known Ernest Hemingway. They fall hard for each other, marry & set their sites on Paris. Here they became part of the fabled “Lost Generation” that included Gertrude Stein, Erza Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Zelda Fitzgerald. This, though, is Hadley’s story of Paris in the Jazz Age – the people and places they meet that set the stage for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It provides us with Hadley’s point of view through out their highest and lowest points in their marriage. Especially the moments that doom their marriage, and relationship.
I really enjoyed this story, the light it sheds on Hadley & Ernest’s daily life, as well as Hemingway’s struggle to find his voice and place among the literary greats of his time. While I admittedly do not know much about Hemingway – in this story I came to have a love/hate relationship with him. Same with Hadley – I don’t understand her passiveness – so completely & utterly passive that it angered me at points. Art evoking emotion – to me this means a great story.
As I work on a comparison of The Innocents/The Age of Innocence I am setting my sight on reading The Sun Also Rises and The Movable Feast. Now the question becomes – if, according to Hemingway, there is no real truth, and noting again this work is a novel, then we, the readers, are left to decipher what is true.
The Real EBC 