The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"I close my eyes and lean into Ernest, smelling bourbon and soap, tobacco and damp cotton-and everything about this moment is so sharp and lovely, I do something completely out of character and just let myself have it."



"We called Paris the great good place, then, and it was. We invented it after all. We made it with our longing and cigarettes and Rhum St. James; we made it with smoke and smart and savage conversation and we dared anyone to say it wasn't ours. Together we made everything and then we busted it apart again.

There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city. I couldn't bear it, and so I backed away-and the reason I could do it at all, the reason I was strong enough and had the legs and the heart to do it, was because Ernest had come along and changed me. He helped me see what I really was and what I could do. Now that I knew what I could bear, I would have to bear losing him."



"He and I had already had our time, and though it was very close and real to me, as beautiful and poignant as any place on the map, it was, in truth, another time-another country."



"...I only cried a very little, and then it was gone."



"The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time-but under this, I knew he was still lost. ...that he feared death so so much he sought it out where and however he could. He was such an enigma, really fine and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn't one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true."



I have read little of Hemingway's works, but fell in love with A Moveable Feast. Paula McLain has created an amazing story, almost poetry at times. I loved this book. A novel, yes, but in a way it felt like a peek into reality. I appreciated the complexities of the individuals...the contradictions in character. It made her characters feel only so very real. The way the lifestyle of the peers that Ernest and Hadley wrapped around themselves slowly influenced them-to the sorrow of those same peers in the end. I stand in awe of the author as I agonized over the startling reality of the Hemingways' marriage crumbing around them and their life continuing with it's disorienting moments of normality.



Falling away from each other is not clean or easy or quick or simple, it pulls us and tears us...two people who have become one in a marriage cannot be torn apart by circumstance or choice without losing bits of themselves in the process. Without leaving pieces behind and carrying broken parts with you. I think the harshness of this was felt in the story of Ernest and Hadley.



You fell in love with him right along with her, and you ached as their marriage was ending. As in life, we are more than one-dimensional, we are vindictive and kind, we are confident and insecure-one person isn't painted "villian", but many facets of their person was given and in the end-it was all true.



I gave this book 5 stars even though I don't admire or agree with much of the content...the worldview is so different from my own, but because I personally appreciated it very much. If you enjoy Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, Paris, complexity of character, a good debate-starting point (ha!), this is a must-read.



**Caution to younger readers.



View all my reviews