As France recollects itself after this week’s terror attacks in Paris, many survivors and supporters are looking to art as a way to fight back. Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about his time in 1920s Paris has come to symbolize the city’s resilience.
Parisians are rushing to buy Hemingway’s A Movable Feast (Paris est une Fete), published in 1964, both as a hard copy and online. According to Bloomberg, the book’s sales climbed 50-fold just this week after a French news station interviewed a 77-year-old woman who encouraged everyone to read the book.
As Hemingway wrote in his memoir, “we ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”
Supporters are laying the books among flowers and tributes at the places where people were attacked while others are simply reading A Movable Feast for comfort. Hashtags like #tousaubistrot and #jesuisenterrasse, or “everyone to the bistro” and “I’m on the terrace,” are also encouraging people to keep up their usual routines of visiting bars, cafes and restaurants.
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