The Sun Also Rises

what a rather good bit of Rot that was. some of it was very good but some was utter rot. hence the rating. this is the full realization of Hemmingway's praised iceberg writing style made famous by his short story Hills like white elephants. where simple dialogue masks massive unsaid feelings just under the surface. and for a good part of the book it is very successful.

I found the scenes with lady Brett Ashley fascinating. Ashley is such a good character a modern woman, adventurous, independent, glamorous, and always the center of attention. no wonder their are so many American women named Ashley. looked it up used to be a British male name. but because of Hemmingway's female dynamo it is a very common female name. Whether she was with Jake, Mike, or Robert Cohn. the amount of feeling she put into flippant words like "Rather" is palpable. Jake Barnes even reflects about the strange way the well borne British (Ashley) talks to hint the reader to his signature literary device. i could write a whole review about the Lady Brett Ashley but moving on. Hemmingway not only tells 1)a love story from a man perspective. 2)tells a story of the wealthy for the middle or lower classes. 3)relates the everyday life of highly educated authors in the common tongue. ever ask a man what he thinks love is? your not going to get poetic words. few men are a affluent as Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde. you will get shrugs and mumbles mostly. most men express felling with actions not words. they are possessive (Cohn) Jealous (Mike) and impotent (Jake Barnes) it is clear that all three are aspect of Hemmingway himself. this is the point where a under-educated Butcher from Georgia tells you Hemmingway's place in literary history. well not quite. but while other contemporary Authors are writing books about rich people for upper class readers (Fitzgerald) or Works of geniuses for literary types (Joyce). Hemmingway writes a simple plotless novel about wealthy people in simple prose for common Americans. I could go on about literacy rates rising due to improved public education system and the American middle class having more free time to read but the popularity of the book among the masses speaks for itself. Hemmingway bridges the class barriers and gives a new demographic of reader a chance to thumb their nose at their supposed betters both Educational and financial! all that aside the sun also rises is a story you experience and are not just told. one truly feels like part of Jake Barnes exclusive group of friend traveling and drinking in Europe and that is an experience many American found amazing at the time. for when the world was just starting to open up for middle class Americans the age of American isolationist ended with WW1. Hemmingway gave them a story of nights in Paris and bullfights in Pamplona. we might be use to that by now but that was anything but boring to them.

That's the main problem though the sun also rises is plotless and boring to modern readers. it also has some problematic elements like antisemitism and sexism which were part of the times it was written. The sun also rises is a huge part of the American literary culture. so it's one of those classics you should read even if it's a rather plotless bit of rot! so give a great 20th century writer a little props. and raise a glass to Ernest Hemmingway!

“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”

I picked up this book as part of my ongoing plan to work through the Pop Chart 100 Essential Novels list. Despite what I’m about to say, I don’t really quibble with this book’s inclusion. Ernest Hemingway is going to have a book on this list, and his debut novel—with its famous depictions of the running of the bulls and bullfighting in Pamplona—is apparently his best book and a quintessential example of his writing style of short sentences and understated descriptions. The novel so full of themes and symbols—masculinity, naturalism, sex, drinking, bullfighting—that I don’t know how I got out of AP American Literature 30+ years ago without being required to read it (or at least the Cliff’s Notes version

This review is influenced by not only the characters and the story, but also my general lack of patience with the books depicting 'the lost generation' and the 'Jazz age'.

I've read that this is argued to be Hemingway's best work, showing the resilience of that generation, but I have to disagree - I don't see how descent into alcoholism, lack of any introspection whatsoever, mistaking attraction for love and outright refusal to acknowledge financial situations is being resilient and strong. The novel does provoke thought, however it has been difficult for me to relate to it.

Though the depiction of the society was authentic, there is minimum or no character growth, especially as none of the characters seemed to face any real consequences of their actions. The novel ends with all of them in almost exactly the same positions as at the beginning; 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' isn't a very satisfying end.

✍

There will always be a special place in my heart for this book. It's easily one of my favorite books of all time. Definitely my favorite Hemingway book (it's quite different from the rest). No, it's not perfect. Yes, it gets a bit boring in the middle when its main focus is on bull fighting. But for the most part, the story is funny and wonderful and quite touching. The dialogue is so alive, it practically has a pulse. Nobody writes dialogue like that anymore. It's snappy, fast, witty, honest... and there's a lot of it. I could read chapters 3 and 4 of this book every day for the rest of my life and not get tired of them because of how much I love the dialogue and the character interactions.

The characters are fantastic and entertaining to boot. Even the less likeable ones are quite amusing. And I just love the chemistry between Jake and Brett. So well written. When you watch a movie, it's easy to detect if the characters/actors have good chemistry or not because it tends to be more of a physical thing. But in a book, it's not so easy. And they aren't an obvious match either. Jake is kind of that typical, cool guy from back in the day with a sarcastic attitude who dishes out sarcastic one-liners like a pro. Brett is a beautiful, sophisticated woman who, on the surface is the outgoing sort who eats up her wild party life and loves the attention it brings her. She loves to be doted on and seems to live her life like she must be out and about at all times, doing fun things. But there's more depth to her than that, and for the most part, you only see it when she's with Jake. Especially when she's alone with Jake. Which only happens a few brief times in the story. Then you realize, hmm...maybe her outgoing ways are really more of purposeful distraction.

I love tragic love stories. When two people feel a deep, heartbreaking love for one another, yet can never truly be together. At least not in the way they want. Not in this lifetime, due to their particular circumstances. In this case, she's married. He's handicapped. Yet, their madly in love (which is obvious, without either of them ever actually saying so to one another or anyone else for that matter), even if they aren't brave enough to do anything about it, so they settle for friendship and do their best to distract themselves with reality, so they don't have to think about it. That's real life. It happens all the time.

I could easily feel the sexual tension between Brett and Jake whenever they were together on the page. And that's because of how it was written. Their connection wasn't shoved down my throat. It was in their body language, and most of all, what they didn't say. But sometimes it was what they did say. And that was always perfect too. It was always, just enough to convey their emotions. Lots of subtlety and talking their way around the emotional elephant in the room, which is always a good thing in my opinion.

Also, I love love love the ending. Love the last two or three pages. Love the last paragraph. Love the last line. It may not be a storybook happy ending, but if I wrote this book, it's exactly how I would have ended it too. So much left unsaid. So much beautiful sadness lingering in the air between them. And even right before that, when they are sitting down to have wine/lunch together, nervously fumbling over their words in the last couple pages... don't even get me started. There's so much heartache on display in that one scene (despite them both acting very upbeat), without the characters uttering a single word about how they actually feel. Again, so true to life!

I completely understand why people might not agree with me on any or even most of what I've said in this review. I've read plenty of bad reviews for this book. But for those who do... For those who have been there and experienced a taste of this in your own life... Then you know where I'm coming from. There's real love in this story. And love can be sad. And it can be beautiful. And sometimes it's both. And that is what this book captures perfectly. Hemingway's debut novel (written in 1926!), and for me, he never wrote a better one. It feels very fresh, exciting and independent like when Quentin Tarantino released "Reservoir dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" in the 90's. Or a french new wave movie from the 60's such as Godard's "Pierrott Le fou."

So for anyone who has tried to read Hemingway in the past and just couldn't get into his stories, I don't blame you at all. He's one of my favorite authors, but his books are not the easiest to read. Particularly his heavier books like, "For whom the bell tolls." He has a few that I just can't get through because I lose interest. But don't let that stop you from giving this one a shot. It's unlike anything else that he ever wrote. And if it's not for you, then no big deal. There's a million other books to read. But if it is, I promise you won't ever forget it.

If I were Hemingway's English teacher (or anyone's any kind of teacher) I'd say, "This reads more like a screenplay than a novel. Where are your descriptions, where is the emotion??"
And he would say something like, "The lack of complex descriptions helps focus on the complexities and emptiness of the characters' lives, and the emotion is there, it's only just beneath the surface, struggling to be free!"
And I'd say, "OK, I'll move ya from a C to C+."

Basically The Sun Also Rises shows that Hemingway liked bullfights a lot more than most of the people reading his books, and that he was vain but also hated himself. While the characters are wittily funny from time to time, the whole thing doesn't hold a candle to, I don't know, Seinfeld. Without being told, "Ah yes, this is about the true character of America!" you'd think it was just a drab romance novel with more subtleties than most.

Speaking of, how was this about America? It was more about America's elite. Most Americans in 1926 weren't hanging out in France and Spain, moaning about their lives. They were hanging out in America, trying to make it. You know, without dying.

Pretentious, with poor descriptions and transparent characters (I can give a character a subtle injury too and have it pain him, does that make me amazing?), The Sun Also Rises is one of the most overrated books I've ever read. I'd rather read a 1926 newspaper.

Rereading The Sun Also Rises in July is like watching It's a Wonderful Life in December -- a worthy tradition. Too bad I don't do it. Every fifth to tenth July, is more like it.

But I found three clippings in my old copy (pictured). One was a newspaper photo of a drunk being tossed by a bull in the running of the bulls in Pamplona. The San Fermin Festival there is always around the Fourth of July and provides much more bang for your buck than a silly fireworks show. All you do is don white, wear a red sash about the waist and neck, and get wasted. Then run like hell ahead of the bulls and hope you don't wind up on an AP syndicate photo released to the world under the words "Advantage: Bull."

The other clippings: one was a list of notes I wrote for an on-line book group. Don't remember which one or where, actually, but it happened. The other was a recipe for Rum St. James I wrote down. Oddly, though Hem describes every manner of drink and meal he has in this book, Rum St. James isn't one of them. That was from A Moveable Feast, proof that I mixed Hemingway books as frequently as I mixed metaphors at one time.

As it is his second book (but first famous one), The Sun Also Rises is less self-parody than some of EH's other books. Some of that clipped speech and repetition stuff, learned from Gertrude Stein (ugh), yes, but not so bad. And of course EH's fascination with women who had short, boyish hair (in this case, Lady Brett Ashley). Anti-semitism? Boy, howdy.

Imagine reading this if you were actually on this trip (it's a roman à clef, so characters match real people). Especially if you were Robert Cohn. Ouch. But really, the whole lot of them come off badly. It's the scenery that wins best character award. Especially San Sebastian at the end, where Jake "baptizes" himself in the Atlantic by cleansing off the whole rotten mess that the fiesta created. Love those ten pages or so. As a reader, I needed a rebirth too.

Then, of course, the ending. A perfect finish. How many episodes in life can end with the words, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Too many. It's so good I thought it might be in Ecclesiastes like the title, but no.

Anyway, it was a grand mood read and a great book to reread in Maine on vacation in the sun with the dry smell of pine needles and the sun glinting off the water so its reflection does that gold dance thing on the tree boughs above. You can take naps, too, letting your head rest against the old book with its yellow pages and signature smell of old paper and ink.

That smell is comfort food for readers, plain and simple -- a time machine to the first time you read a favorite book and thought you'd found the best friend you never had. What can I say. First-blush sentiments carry you away like that....

Let me begin by saying that I hold Hemingway in high esteem: so much so that while at the Key West Literary Seminar this year I visited his home for a second time. I have read nearly all of his novels and admire his devotion to writing insofar as he lived humbly in Paris among the Lost Generation to establish himself as a novelist. He paid his existential and literary dues as a novelist and was richly rewarded for his gifts. "The Sun Also Rises" is an early work and, although one can see his promise as a novelist, this particular novel suffers from a green, immature style, which is often the case of early novels. The book is taken from Hemingway's experiences in Paris on the Left Bank, the fiestas of Pamplona during the running of the bulls and fishing for trout in the mountains of Northern Spain. Despite the relative immaturity of his style he was an innovator: he was one of the early novelists to write dialogue with a truly sensitive ear attuned toward the ways in which ordinary people spoke to each other. He was committed to creating verisimilitude in dialogue and dialect. The characters cover themselves in their conversations with the slang of the day: "Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, (sic) you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship...The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on." One claim he makes, the truth of which may not be denied, is that we certainly pay for the things that we do: "You paid some way for everything that was any good." So Hemingway produces a literary style for dialogue that is so readily played out in the novelists who follow him and becomes so advanced in its execution by them that a work like "The Sun Also Rises" almost seems a parody in many places. It must be one of the most quoted works in the Good Bad Hemingway Contest held annually which both praises and parodies his novels. He writes in criticism of another writer that "He's through... He's written about all the things he knows, and now he's on all the things he doesn't know." Hemingway always wrote about the things that he knew from first-hand experience: war, fishing, writing, Cuba, Key West, the UP of Michigan, Paris, safari and women. Hem was a man of half as many wives as Henry VIII. Although he knew many women intimately, he didn't really understand them fully. I find that in many places Hemingway's women, even Lady Brett Ashley, play over and over again primarily as helpless objects of desire. In this book like most of his other characters Brett is a flat character and a stereotype for women of his era. I also found that other minorities (Jews, Afro-Americans) seem diminished in his work except for bull fighters and fishermen, essentially they are servants to a greater or lesser extent. Later in the "Old Man and the Sea" clearly this is not the case but it is true here in this book. He still has not yet really developed the sense of humanity which would emerge later to earn him a Nobel Prize for Literature. The male characters also seem flat with the Jewish boxer, Robert Cohn, and his hedonistic friends, Bill and the drunken Michael. He draws the bullfighter, Romero, a Spanish Romeo quite elegantly because he imbues in this character the deep respect Hemingway had for the courageous bullfighters and also portrays the bulls themselves as heroic, magnificent forces of nature, downstream like the great marlin, doomed by man's tragic desire to conquer and kill them for sport or sustenance as God similarly may play with mankind. Jake Barnes is a well drawn figure because he is Hemingway. It's as if Hemingway created Robert Cohn to be himself like a boxer, and Mike like the big drinker and the Hemingway women as the objects of desire that he sought. The book is poorly edited: I know, sorry, not withstanding Maxwell Perkins this is heresy but I stand by my claim. The stories about the fiesta at Pamplona and running of the bulls and the trout fishing and Brett with Romero weave a compelling tale worth reading. His writing about bull fighting and fishing attest to his fascination with both sports and elsewhere in hunting on safari. Then there is, of course, the elegant innuendo of the unfortunate war wound, one of the great scars of life for a man devoted to total immersion in his existential experience: none of us go through life without scars and a few may become immortal but rarely do we come out alive in the end. By all means read Hemingway but perhaps not this novel. Read the immortal works of Hemingway in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Torrents of Spring" and even "Across the River and into the Trees" which impress me more as the Nobel Prize winner rather than the green, American newspaperman in Paris of the Lost Generation. Hemingway is an iconic American author whose simplicity of style and power in telling a story earned him vast wealth and reverence as a writer during and after his lifetime: what novelist worth his salt wouldn't want to come back in the next life as Hem?