In life, there comes a time, and I think it is total, that we cannot escape, where we doubt everything: that doubt is writing.

4.5 stars. Easily the most fun I have had reading in a while. I am the first admit I have harbored a cliched longing for Paris most of my adult life. I have been there twice, though heartbreak, public intoxication, a general strike and seeing my wife's compatriots treated like thugs haven't reinforced that dream. Alas I turn to Moveable Feast again and again and my thoughts drift to La Maga and the ontology of toothpaste.

There's a time tested Tristram Shandy dimension to this novel, or is it a lecture? A Catalan novelist is invited to Paris to give a three day lecture on irony. The lecture he presents is the novel, or, maybe not exactly? The house of mirrors refracts and as soon as Orson Welles cracks a brogue, the reader, or is it the novelist/lecturer is encountering Perec and Beckett on the streets of the City of Light? Many digressions are but portals to further backtracking. There is a sinuous stream of citation. Erudition leaking to cocktail party aquifer.
The title is a line from Hemingway and the attendant context is how Papa was never as poor and never as happy as when he was in Paris. The protagonist counters that he was never as miserable as he was in Paris and then he name-drops---everyone. The final third of the novel (possibly the final day of the lecture) is one of despair. This is a novel about creation, the elusiveness of bohemian actualization.