Интересна и противоречива следвоенна „Фиеста“... Персонажите в книгата пътуват непрекъснато из Франция и Испания, понякога създават любовни драми, а най-често пиянстват по хотели, кафенета и барове... Сюжетът не ме впечатли особено, но ми беше любопитна атмосферата в Западна Европа след Първата световна война. Историята има ярко биографично звучене - авторът вероятно е вложил много преживени от него събития. Романът като цяло е приличен и не съжалявам, че го прочетох, но определено повече ми харесват разказите на Хемингуей!




„Има хора, на които не можеш да казваш обидни неща. Те създават чувството, че ако им кажеш някои работи, светът буквално ще се разпадне пред очите ти.“


„Може би с течение на годините човек научава нещо. Все ми е едно какво представлява светът. Едно искам да знам — как да живея в него. Може би, ако разбереш как трябва да живееш в него, ще ти стане ясно и какъв е той.“


„Англичаните изразяват мислите си с интонация. Така че един израз може да означава всичко...“

Dull

I was incredibly tempted to abandon this book due to its dull writing style.
The sheer volume of unnecessary details was overwhelming, the plot was virtually nonexistent, and the characters lacked any real depth.
It honestly felt like a waste of time. However, a few days later, I found myself repeatedly reflecting on their trip, the fun they experienced, and even the very details that initially bored me.
So, although it's far from a great book, the author undeniably managed to make the story stick with me.

There’s a very nice restaurant that my wife and I frequent that has become our go-to spot for special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries. When we first started going here, I saw that they were serving absinthe. I’d been curious about the drink since first reading Hemingway’s descriptions of it in The Sun Also Rises back in high school.

Banned for most of the twentieth century in the U.S. for wildly exaggerated claims of it’s hallucinogenic qualities, it was made available to be imported here again in 2007. When I saw it on the menu, my mind immediately conjured images of Hemingway and his fellow expatriates sipping it in Paris with ironic detachment. (The restaurant even features a Hemingway inspired version mixed with champagne that’s called Death in the Afternoon.) I wanted to try some, but it’s $12 a glass, which seemed a bit pricey for the sake of literary cocktail experimentation. And I gotta admit that I was slightly nervous about having some kind of absinthe-based freak-out.

However, I’ve been on a Jazz Age book kick lately, and a few weeks back when we were having dinner at this place, I finally said to hell with it and ordered a glass. The waiter asked if I’d tried it before and must have had some bad experiences with newbies drinking it. I promised him I was indulging for purely experimental purposes and would not hold him responsible.

So he brought the absinthe out and did the whole bit with the special spoon and the sugar cube. I would have been lost there except I’d seen Johnny Depp do this routine in From Hell.

Finally, I tried my first sip.

It tasted like a combination of black licorice and what I can only assume is the flavor of rotting corpses. And I hate black licorice so much that I almost would have preferred just the rotting corpse taste.

However, when you pay $12 for a drink, you choke that mother down. So I drank it, cursing Hemingway the entire time and wishing I could dig his body up and reanimate him so I could give him another shotgun blast to the face for ever putting the idea of drinking that vile stuff into my head in the first place.

Oh, and that night, I had some of the most fucked up nightmares I’ve had in years so maybe the hallucinogenic qualities weren’t exaggerated all that much.

So when I was re-reading The Sun Also Rises and Jake gets completely hammered on absinthe, I almost tossed my cookies as the memory of that black licorice flavored corpse came back to me. Repeated exposure to that drink would also explain why Jake would put up with Brett’s routine. Your junk doesn’t work but you keep hanging out with the woman who claims to love you but demands your help in hooking up with other men? I would have been on a boat to Antarctica to get away from her man-eating ass, but he was deranged from drinking that shit.

This book is still pretty damn good, but I’m deducting a star just because it tricked me into trying absinthe. Take that, Hemingway!

This is my fourth time reading The Sun Also Rises, and my familiarity with its details allowed my mind to sort of slip between the lines.

This time through, I could see the main character, Jake Barnes, as the symbol for a 'lost generation' of men that served as soldiers during WWI. In truth, he’s a symbol for any soldier of any war that has served and been deeply affected by combat. I was able to see the pain of Jake’s injury, which is hidden just below the surface of everything that he shows to the world. It all seemed very analogous to the psychological stress of combat that plagues so many of our veterans even though we never see it. Jake moves through life with his silent handicap and in doing so constantly fights a battle between who he wanted to be and who he has become.

Along these same lines, I saw Lady Ashley, Brett, as symbolic of the benefits brought about by the sacrifices made by Jake and the veterans of WWI. She is taking the new, war-free Europe by storm and abandoning all the old traditions. She loves Jake but does not offer any sort of commitment to him or gratitude. Her grasps for the moment eliminate any sort of retrospective perspective. She is carefree and symbolizes the spirit of the Roaring 20s.

The very end of the novel suggests the incompatibility between Jake and Brett. In doing so, it also suggests the incompatibility between the carefree times of the 1920s and the solemn nature of the former soldiers that survived the war and brought those times into being.

---

This is my third reading of The Sun Also Rises with each reading being about ten years apart. In looking back, I find that I latched on to a different element of Hemingway’s story each time.

In my 30's I loved the stoic code-hero character represented by Jake Barnes. Chaos happens all around Jake. His friends are a personal embarrassment who are all bad drunks. He is a respected aficionado of bullfighting in its native land and yet his fellow Spanish comrades of the sport hold his friends in contempt. And the girl that he loves dismisses him out of hand. Yet, he keeps his cool and never behaves badly. He acts out the meaning of grace under pressure.

In my 40's I loved the rustic travel elements of the novel. Hemingway brought to life the simple pleasures of sitting in a cafe in Paris. Where drinks with friends, under an awning overlooking a street, could be a complete slice of life all on its own. The old-world Spanish setting of Pamplona is made real complete with the hot sun, but also tempered with the contrasting coolness of both shade and breeze. And he assures us that staying in a modest but well-cared for hotel can evoke the feeling of being at home in a place that is far from home.

Now in my 50's I found the relationships to be my focus. An entire mix of hopelessness, jealousy, raw attraction, and desperation all plague these characters. The men in the novel all take a turn at dancing with the idealized and deeply flawed Brett Ashley. And one by one, their individualized dreams of relationship perfection are all shown to land far from reality. There is one man, however, that ultimately comes to see a life with Brett Ashley for what it would truly be. For him, the sun also rises.

The complexity of this novel combined with its brevity shows how hard Hemingway worked to produce his literary diamond; where all the fluff is cut away leaving a book that feels inviting to the imagination. As it is, it seems slightly too long for being so short of a book. As such, I wonder what I’ll find next in it while reading it in my 60's.

Dry. Bare. Brittle. But not drying out so far. Quite the contrary.
Dry like a very dry Jerez, a "manzanilla." But he doesn't drink Jerez in Spain before, brandy de Jerez from Fundador, after a few bottles of dry rioja.
In Paris, however, he always has a siphon close at hand for his whiskey, and the fine is still in the water, but the wine remains dry, whether it is Piquette or Chateau-Margaux.
He drinks dry and writes dry. He's Hemingway, but he's also his hero, Jacob (Jake) Barnes. A journalist who haunts bars and nightclubs in the Quartier Latin with friends thirsty as him and on both shores. From Montparnasse too. Americans like him. And in English sometimes. And an English one. A Unique. Lady Ashley. Brett has a boyish hairstyle. Who quickly becomes infatuated and passes from the arms to the arms. By love? But no! Infatuation, perhaps. Need escort, parade, never in the arms of Barnes. And yet. But it is impossible. They got to know each other; she is a volunteer nurse and hurts him. There's a nasty wound that keeps them from materializing their love. Since then, they turn around, and he follows his connections calmly.
The reader travels with them for a long time in Paris until they decide to leave in a group for Spain, fish for trout, and especially for the feast of San Fermin in Pamplona. The Fiesta! Los Sanfermines! The bulls ran in the streets to the corrals, the bullring enclosures, and the Plaza de Toros. The raging crowd rushed past them. And the bullfights! The ballet of bullfighters and the smell of blood in the air! And eight days of festivities, fireworks, songs and dances, bands of jota dancers, bands of fifes and drums! It will be eight days of dreams and nightmares for the Barnes gang. Eight days of drunkenness, or they will explode. They will insult each other; they will fight, always for them. - or because of - the beautiful eyes of Brett, who, affirming his inconstant pose, will leave them, will reject the English of service which was to marry her to follow a beautiful toreador of 19 years. Inconstancy? Constance, instead, is in a love that she knows is impossible, unrealizable. And so the end of the book can only bring us back to its beginning, in a kind of loop without exit, without hope, dry, dry to prevent the tears from blooming:
"- Oh, Jake, " said Brett, " We could have been so happy together!
In front of us, an officer in khaki controlled traffic from the top of his horse. He raised his staff. The cab suddenly slows down, pressing Brett against me.
- Yes, I say. But, of course, it's always nice to think about. "
Very dry writing. Descriptions and dialogues. Without introspective passages. Without psychological explanations. And that gives a moving book. This work is the secret of Hemingway's "iceberg writing": it reveals what we see, and the reader senses the enormous mass of emotions that lurk beneath the surface. Some saw it as a description of the interior of the famous "lost generation" of Americans exiled in Paris; others as an ode to hedonism. I saw perhaps the opposite: a cry of alarm, a cry for help, and above all, a remarkable love story. Impossible, of course, for the most incredible compassion, for the most excellent emotion of the reader. And suppose we want at all costs to speak of a lost generation. In that case, it is perhaps the whole generation of the post-war period, the post-World War I, the horror of trenches. Still, it is precise to her that Hemingway dedicates the title of his book (after trying to call it Fiesta): The Sun Also Rises, the Sun Also Rises. After the night always comes the day. The Sun rises every day and will always give us light and hope. Precarious, not assured, but hope all the same.
I will repeat myself, and you will forgive me: it is a remarkable love story.

Reposting in conjunction with the annual "running of the bulls" in Pamplona, Spain, where much of this novel takes place.

“Everyone behaves badly”—Jake

“You are all a lost generation”—Gertrude Stein

Since I had just found Everyone Behaves Badly: The Story Behind the Making of The Sun Also Rises; since I was meeting up with friend BC, who wrote his MA thesis on this book; since I was flying from Chicago to Palm Springs to participate in a “bachelor’s party” this weekend, and because the kind of excessive and regrettable bad behavior depicted in the book is also a feature of bachelor’s parties and I thought it would be interesting to reflect on that IN that process, I decided to pull this classic novel off the shelf, dust it off and reread it on the plane there. I had the luxury of basically reading it in one sitting!

The story takes place from Paris to Pamplona during the Fiesta we know now as featuring The Running of the Bulls. The centerpiece of the story is a woman, Lady Brett Ashley, whom my noir reading leads me to identify as Hemingway's characterization of a femme fatale, who ignites (or sometimes merely walks into a room and watches) a lot of drunken, jealous bad behavior over her, the young men lying in waste at her feet.

“She takes her razor from her boot, and a thousand pigeons fall around her feet”—Tom Waits

There’s a lot of funny drinking talk and bar stories in this book that begin to wear on you over time, as they will and should, as Hem would have you experience it, as you learn to pay attention to the underlying tensions between various men over their fatal attraction to this strikingly attractive 34-year old woman. Jake, our American journalist Hem-based hero, injured “down there” during the war, would be Lady Brett's lover, but he can’t consummate their love, and sex is apparently part of the regular daily diet of Brett with, among others, Mike, her Scottish fiancé; Bill, Jake’s American fishing buddy; Robert Cohn, the writer and amateur boxer whose skills in the latter figure in a scene we build toward in the whole book, and Pedro Romero, a 19-year old bull fighter, with a true passion for bullfighting, and, as it turns out, older women. Jake is still in love with Brett, but kind of just watches in anguish as this train wreck unfolds.

When I was reading it in my early twenties I wanted to be one of those expatriates, reading and writing and drinking my way through Europe with other people my age, and I did go there in my twenties to zig zag across the continent and hang out with people from all over the place, and over the years have traveled from Paris to Pamplona, from Florence to London, from Amsterdam to Zurich, my backpack on my back. But now I feel less charitable about these folks behaving badly, and see this bad-behaving as largely the point of the book this time around.

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”

This “lostness” of people living in “arrested development,” not sure what their futures hold, not sure how to live their lives, aching for something that happens to be largely fleeting. Hemingway’s departures from the drunken lust--classic descriptions of fishing and Romero’s bullfighting (yes, I know they are murdering bulls)--have a kind of (intended) purity to cleanse the palate of Jake, who at one point, sick of it all, says “To hell with people”. Hemingway’s moral/social code gets established early on: Independence, faithfulness, connections to nature, and acute powers of observation.

“In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work.”

I think this may be only my third time reading it; while I think this is BC’s favorite Hem, I have liked A Farewell to Arms, Old Man and the Sea and (especially) the stories better. But despite the fact that Hem damaged a lot of friendships by writing this book (the fictional characters were thinly disguised portraits of all the friends he drank with there), it is nevertheless really well-written, has passages in it lyrical enough to bring tears to your eyes, and is in my opinion still one one of the greats of American literature, a companion for other tales of misguided desire and wrecked lives, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night.

“Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.

"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?”—Sun

Uh.

Review to follow.

OK. I have to admit I didn’t like this that much.


I seem to be more of a fan of Hemingway short stories than his full length books. I get the message in this one. The characters are from the lost generation, and they are listless, emotionally numb, jaded, bitter and enigmatic.

And that’s fine. But I seem to not have much interest in these type of stories. I noticed that when I read that topic, I usually wind up not liking the book whoever may have written it.


And this one doesn’t really have much of a plot. It just follows the cast of characters from one night club to another, from one drink to another, from one drunken night to another, from one sexual Escapade to another.


That’s not to say the writing is not fantastic. I love the Way Hemingway wrote. I just didn’t love this book. I really didn’t care about the characters almost all of whom I disliked.


But it’s more than that. The only thing in the book that really interested me was the relationship between Brett and the main character. but there really wasn’t as much interaction between them as I’d have liked.

I also really didn’t like brett at all. At times I felt a little like I was reading an earlier version of breakfast at Tiffany’s as Brett really reminded me of holly Golightly..

And every male character practically in the book was in love with Brett, just as they were with Golightly in breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I’ve read so many books, and seen so many films, on empty people without purpose. After a while, it makes me a little jaded. I know how it is to feel empty and directionless, but I have read this topic so often that it feels stale now.

Perhaps I should’ve read this one in childhood, and I would have appreciated it more.

I found this novel a bit slow and not really having a plot did not help. Jake had a nasty injury in the war is in love with Brett an aristocrat lady and it is unrequited. He drinks, goes fishing in Spain for trout, drinks, goes to a fiesta in Pamplona and watches bull fights and drinks some more. In places it is lovely albeit somewhat over descriptive.

I feel I have to revisit this book again and think I missed the point of it. The characters after the Great War were struggling to feel and trying to hard not to feel. Brett sleeping with the men, jealousy, antisemitism and trying to make sense of the world in 1924.

کل داستان تکرار این سیکله:
از تاکسی پیاده میشی، میری توی کافه، مهم نیست کجای شهری، اصن توی کدوم شهری، یه آشنا یا یه غریبه هست که باهاش مینوشی و حین نوشیدن بازم بیشتر می‌نوشی. از بار میزنی بیرون، یه آشنای دیگه میبینی که تورو به یه آشنای دیگه معرفی میکنه و دارن میرن بنوشن و باهاشون همراه میشی و مینوشی. چند بار بازم از یه بار به یه کلاب به یه کافه تغییر موقعیت میدی و آشناهای سطحی رو میبینی و تنها کاری که میکنید نوشیدنه. نوشیدن هدفه؟ نه! ما هدفی نداریم، ما نسل گم‌گشته ایم... . دو یا سه شب برمیگردی خونه، فردا یادت نمیاد که کی برگشتی، چجوری خوابیدی و اصلا چه اتفاقی افتاد. ساعات کوتاه کارِت رو میگذرونی و دوباره، رفتن به بار ،نوشیدن و نسل گم‌گشته بودن!
-------------
این یه کتابی بود که اگر خودم به تنهایی دست میگرفتم و به عنوان یه داستان از اول تا آخرشو میخوندم ممکن بود دوتا چیز پیش بیاد:
۱.نصفه رهاش کنم و تا مدتی طولانی سراغ بقیه آثار همینگوی نرم.
۲. به زور به پایان برسونمش و در حد ۲ ستاره باشه برام و با یه برچسب "تایپ من نبود" از کنارش رد بشم.
ولی خب؛ خوش‌شانس بودم و قبل از شروع کتاب یه سایتی پیدا کردم که فصل به فصل، خلاصه ها، تفسیر و تم و موتیف داستان رو خیلی روون و قابل هضم توضیح میداد. ذره ذره خوندمش و گذاشتم آروم جذب بشه.. . که باعث شد باهاش ارتباط برقرار کنم و همراه جِیک، دو صبح ، تو رختخوابم برای بِرِت گریه کنم، خاطرات جنگی که ازش زنده و غمگین بیرون اومدم رو مرور کنم، توی خیابون های پاریس دهه بیست قدم بزنم و برم اسپانیا تا یه جشنواره گاوبازی رو از نزدیک ببینم.
من ترجمه محمد حیاتی از نشر نیلوفر رو خوندم که به غیر از سانسور بی‌مورد، ایراد دیگه‌ای نداشت و روون بود.
(من نمیدونم اینکه آدم توی جنگ دچار ناتوانی جنسی شده باشه چرا باید سانسور بشه:

|) بخاطر همین یه ستاره کم کردم.
--------------
به احتمال زیاد اون سایتی که گفتم رو از قبل میشناسید، SparkNotes.com
و این هم لینک توضیحات این کتاب:
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/sun/th...

My feelings haven't changed since my last re-read of The Sun Also Rises (my earlier review is below). I'm still amazed at how fully the characters come alive on the page! I don't think The Sun Also Rises is for everyone; however, nearly from beginning to end, I'm engaged in the story.

Just finished a re-read of The Sun Also Rises (my favorite Hemingway book-last read in 2014). I didn’t provide a review at the time so I thought I would (try to) explain why this book speaks to me. First, it is deceptively easy to fall into with its short sentences and simple language. Nothing is forced. However, it is the mood Hemingway creates in this novel which really engages me. Perhaps that says as much about me as it does about the novel. The appeal is not so much about the story; it is how the characters move through the scenes with a sense that nothing can touch them (while conversely, they can’t really touch or be important to anyone else).

This exemplifies that lack of hope in the so-called ‘lost generation,’ that feeling that nothing you do will make a difference. The Sun Also Rises is not a feel-good book, but it allows you to re-evaluate people as social animals who constantly struggle and fail (and maybe once in a while succeed) in forging meaningful relationships. In some ways, the carefree expat life of the characters seems idyllic; however, Hemingway also makes you feel that slipping into this existence (even with its charms) might make you want to spit at the world. The Sun Also Rises captures a historical moment, perhaps not just of the lost generation, but also of future generations uncertain of their place in the world.

I honestly didn't think that this book would be as bad as it was. I was assigned to read this book for class, and the books we've read for class have hitherto been better than this.

This book has virtually no plot, and the characters are very flat. The entire book consists of a group of people, each of them disliking at least one person in their party, driving around Paris drinking. Then they decide to go to Spain and drink. So the rest of the book is about them drinking with each other, drinking with people they meet in Spain, drama, a little more drinking and drama, and a little bit of bullfighting.