A MOVEABLE FEAST

Few listeners are likely to remember what the real Ernest Hemingway sounded like, so it's hard to imagine many would take issue with John Bedford Lloyd as a convincing substitute. Everything one imagines Hemingway to be is present in Lloyd's performance: the rock-solid certainty of conviction, the passion toward cause and person, the hunger for experience, and the alertness to pain—his own and that of others. These are Hemingway's newly edited remembrances of Paris in the 1920s, when his confidence as a writer soared and he was briefly satisfied as a young husband and father. It was also when his acquaintances included other literary lions: Joyce, Fitzgerald, Pound, and Gertrude Stein. With Lloyd ably filling in for the author, youth could hardly seem more intoxicating and full of promise. M.O. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2009]