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The Paris Wife

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This novel is lovely. I am not sure whether the majority of men I know would appreciate it but I fell completely for it and was actually sad when I was finished.

Not keen on Hemingway and his work, I received an in-depth picture of his private life in the first years, before the great success. And I enjoyed it tremenduously. You do not need to know a thing about the great writer to get captured by the psychology and drama between his first wife and him.

A beautiful novel about a woman in strong dependence to her husband. Very entertaining reading.

"The Paris Wife" erzählt von Hemingways erster Ehe mit Hadley Richardson aus ihrer Sicht.

Und schon damit habe ich ein Problem. Vielleicht ist es engstirnig, aber es stellt mich nicht zufrieden, in dem Kopf und den Gefühlen einer historischen Person zu sein, ohne dass es ihre Worte sind, die ich lese, denn ich halte es für anmaßend, ihre Gedanken wiedergeben zu wollen, weil eine solche Halbbiographie nie den fiktionalen Charakter anderer Ich-Erzählungen hat. Hadley hat gelebt und gelitten - doch wie sehr, wie tief, wie umfassend? Ihre eigenen Worte könnten die Fragen erhellen, aber was sind ihre Worte in diesem Roman?

Einen zweiten Stern ziehe ich aufgrund der häufig hölzernen, nichtssagenden Dialoge ab. Oft habe ich mich gewundert, welche Aussage der gerade gelesene Dialog haben soll: Besonders die Dialoge zwischen Hemingway, dem Schriftsteller, und Hadley, der angeblich belesenen Frau, wirken blutleer und irgendwie lebensfern. Wenn sie sich nur das in dem Roman Geschriebene zu sagen gehabt hätten, würde es mich wundern, dass sie überhaupt geheiratet haben.

Dennoch ist die Geschichte interessant, da man Einblicke in das Paris der 20er Jahre und den meist unbedingten Willen eines um Anerkennung kämpfenden, oft von seiner Arbeit getriebenen Schriftstellers erhält. Hemingway hat an sich geglaubt und musste das Ringen um die richtigen Worte wohl seiner Frau (und seinem Sohn) überordnen, sonst wäre er nicht zu dem geworden, was er geworden ist.

The fascination with Ernest Hemingway's years in Paris in the early 1920s seems to never die. Paula McLain explores the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson - the first of Hemingway's four wives and the woman to whom he dedicated The Sun Also Rises. She tells the story of their years together: 1920-27. Ernest and Hadley arrived in Paris in December 1921, and the next few years were clearly happy, until mid 1926, when the idyll in Paris ended with separation in 1926 and divorce the following year.

McLain spends 318 pages casually dropping names and moving on quickly as readers congratulate themselves for having picked up a book where they already know all of the characters - Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, or Lincoln Steffens all make brief appearances in The Paris Wife. McLain's deft descriptions of Left Bank apartments and cafes and the excitement of creating a new kind of life are absorbing. Her Paris is a revelation, filled with writers and artists working in a kind of fever, set among "the working-class Parisians with their cards and goats and fruit baskets and open begging palms." Every day Hemingway goes to a cafe to write, leaving Hadley on her own. They live frugally, primarily on her small inheritance. At first Hadley is lonely, but slowly she meets people - Hemingway's artist friends, then her own small circle. One of them, Pauline Pfeiffer, befriends Hadley, only to become attracted to Hemingway and eventually destroy the marriage.

Unquestionably it was Hemingway's A Moveable Feast with its wealth of love and nostalgia for Hadley that provided the inspiration for Paula McLain's novel. The original version is a series of 20 biographical sketches of Paris in the 1920s. The memoir began, as the yet unproved story goes, as the result of the discovery of two trunks belonging to Hemingway, found by Charles Ritz in the basement of the Hotel Ritz in November 1956. The trunks were left there in 1928, when Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline, left for Key West, Florida. The trunks contained notebooks he had kept during his early Paris years and thirty years later he began stitching together a memoir that included a long apology to Richardson and was itself full of regret. Three years after his suicide in 1961 his then wife Mary edited and published that memoir, without apology to Richardson; it was called "A Moveable Feast."

This is how myths are made. Which is fine, but let's be clear that the closer we hurtle toward myth the farther we get from the complex truth of those lives in that time. There's a scene in the novel (one of the best, and there are a few) in which the author reveals what is actually wrong with the book. Hemingway takes Hadley back to the place in Italy where he was wounded during the war. "It was green and unscarred and completely lovely," Hadley reports. "Nothing felt honest. Thousands of men had died here just a few years earlier, Ernest himself had bled here, shot full of shrapnel, and yet everything was clean and shiny, as if the land itself had forgotten everything."

Während des Lesens habe ich immer wieder im Internet Bilder und Informationen zu den im Roman vorkommenden Personen gesucht, was das Lesevergnügen noch steigern konnte.
Der Autorin gelingt eine interessante Mischung aus biographischen Tatsachen und Fiktion, denn selbstverständlich gibt es auch bei grösstmöglicher Hinzuziehung von Quellen nicht die Möglichkeit in die Haut der Protagonistin, Hadley Richardson Hemingway, zu schlüpfen und intime Details und Gedanken zu erahnen. Durch den in Ichform erzählten Part von Hadley wird die Geschichte dieser Beziehung zum jungen Hemignway sehr lebendig und einnehmend. Da es eben doch vornehmlich um eine emotionsgeladene Sichtweise aus weiblicher Perspektive geht, könnte ich mir jedoch vorstellen, dass die Lektüre für einen Mann nicht in gleicher Weise reizvoll ist.
Dass ich nur mit 4 Sternen bewerte, liegt an der etwas zu häufig aufgegriffen Darstellung einiger Ereignisse und Gewohnheiten (die wiederholten Reisen zu den Stierkämpfen, der mehr als grenzwertige Alkoholkonsum in den beschriebenen Kreisen), was bei mir zu einer leichten, gelegentlichen Langeweile geführt hat.
Insgesamt halte ich den Roman jedoch für eine gelungene Darstellung einer facettenreichen Beziehung und einer interessanten Zeit in den eher ungewöhnlichen Kreisen der Künstler des Paris der 20iger Jahre

"If you do not know, O fairest among women,
Follow in the footsteps of the flock,
And feed your little goats
Beside the shepherds' tents.
I have compared you, my love,
To my filly among Pharaoh's chariots.
Your cheeks are lovely with ornaments,
Your neck with chains of gold." -- Song of Solomon 1:8-10 (NKJV)

Some subjects don't lend themselves as well to historical fiction as others. Describing the first Hemingway marriage from his wife, Hadley's, perspective creates such a problem for at least some readers.

Let me explain. Almost anyone would like Hemingway's writing better than Hemingway himself. The most appealing aspect of his personal life was to have him as a mentor or as a drinking companion. He was ungrateful and willful in all other relationships. So you could hang around and be stepped on . . . or you could move on in your life. Hadley hung around a lot longer than most women would have.

The relationship was imbalanced from the beginning: Hemingway loved himself and his career first, second, and third. If Hadley didn't make a sound, it was all right for her to be around. Otherwise, there were going to be problems.

While it makes good drama to describe that, it's not the sort of inspiring or romantic story that most people want to read. And it's the aspect of Hemingway that's least appealing. It's almost like reading a historical novel about Lord Byron that focused on his disability rather than his poetry.

With those points in mind, I thought Paula McLain did an excellent job of capturing the personalities, the time, and the tragedies of these two lives.

Brava, Ms. McLain!

Das Buch hat mir sehr gut gefallen, es beschreibt die Zeit Hemingways mit seiner ersten Frau in Paris nach dem Krieg, die Bekanntschaften mit u.a. Gertrude Stein und F. Scott Fitzgerald, das Schreiben der ersten Erzählungen und die Reisen nach Spanien zum Stierkampf. Schön geschrieben und auch sehr interessant.

the book was in good quality and it just got that kind of story I want. heartily recommended and you won't regret it.