By hello
Passage: “Anyhow, we were sitting on the terrace of the Café Select…” (gutenberg.org) Le Select, founded in 1923, was one of Montparnasse’s best-known interwar literary brasseries. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway returns to it again and again as a social switchboard: Harvey Stone waits there hungry and defeated, Brett arrives there shaken, and Jake’s circle regathers there almost by reflex. The effect is to make the café feel less like backdrop than infrastructure—the shared room in which the Lost Generation keeps finding one another and failing to improve. (en.wikipedia.org)