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Even though this begins with an account of college boxing, this wasn't as "grr, lads 'n' stuff" (© Father Ted?) as I'd always thought it would be. As Philipp Meyer's brief intro to this edition says, Hemingway's reputation precedes him and isn't necessarily accurate about his books. It's also a holiday in a book, set in hot weather, a good sort of thing to read in June 2020 - but the greater portion of it is a holiday you'd probably rather not have gone on, a reminder of how group holidays can go bad, which is also useful.
Part 1, in which a mixed group of young expat characters hang out in Paris, had an atmosphere which reminded me a lot of being in London in the 00s with a crowd likewise in our late twenties or early thirties. The characters, through the lens of narrator Jake Barnes, have a cynicism, a disdain for the idea of being shocked, and a determination to enjoy themselves whilst knowing it's all a bit meaningless, which I recognised deeply. I wouldn't be surprised if The Sun Also Rises had an impact on Strauss & Howe before they formulated their generational theory, as this novel is the first actual evidence I've seen that might lead to someone thinking of the Lost Generation and Gen X as similar - both being the 'Nomad' type of generation among their four categories despite these cohorts' very different experiences in youth.
Meyer notes that it's essentially a novel of trauma and its aftermath - which potentially provides another way into it for some of those who might jettison Hemingway entirely, but are interested in trauma. It also made interesting reading just now as the characters - as relatively well-off Anglos in 1924 - have put the global crisis of the Great War several years behind them (although they are still affected by it in the background, and in Jake's case physically too) and their cynicism and honesty creates a very different mood from the interweaving of anxiety, chirpy public-spirited rhetoric, and simmering irritability which apparently constitutes the present of one.
Brett Ashley was something of a revelation; if she'd been a character in a historical novel, I'd have thought she was an anachronism, that her role in this social group wouldn't have been possible until the 1980s. In Part 1 she seemed like a more stylish counterpart of a slightly older girl I looked up to at university, who was entirely accepted and respected as one of the boys in a crowd that was maybe 2/3 male, had slept with quite a few of them, was a big drinker apparently unfazed by anything, and was good-natured and funny. That sang-froid and jollity was the most crucial element of her character, far more than I realised in those days - it was that which really inspired respect, without it the other stuff would have looked different - and it's a quality Brett shares. However, unlike Brett Ashley, when the girl from university had a serious relationship, it was sensibly with someone who was barely an acquaintance of the group, and she was actually serious about it. It becomes clearer towards the end of Part 1 of the novel, and in full focus in Part 2, that while Brett is considered good company, and implicitly more of a man than Robert Cohn, that she creates emotional chaos for the central male characters by getting into relationships where at least three of them have fallen in love with her, which they bear with varying degrees of stoicism whilst she blithely moves on as she pleases, and maintains multiple flings despite being engaged. In this, and her glamorous appearance, she seems closer to the tabloid celebrity ladette. She knows what she's like - and that she has been shaken by the Great War and an abusive ex-husband - and she would seem well-suited to polyamory if only it had been around in those days. But it's not as if there weren't models of marginally less messy Bohemian relationship styles for an unconventional well-connected Englishwoman in those days, from the Bloomsbury group. Albeit they hadn't published a how-to…
Jake is apparently the most stoic, but because he's afflicted with a problem that he understandably doesn't want to talk about, and which would still be difficult to talk about now. It's never explained in graphic detail, but he evidently suffered some injury to his dick when his fighter plane crashed in the war, and he can't have sex. The other characters externalise their angst, with sex, fighting or money (though all of them drink a lot). Jake mostly doesn't talk about things and sublimates his masculinity into being a serious bullfighting aficionado. (This is partly that trope of the one white guy who's really great at something special to another ethnic group, even if it is merely fandom, and a reminder of how Spain was, until a few decades ago, exoticised and othered and poorer. But as his status may have become affected by his messy friends and their drama, it's not that simple.)
The characters are considerably richer than my friends were and at one point in Paris, somebody orders an 1811 brandy, which I found out was considered the greatest vintage of the 19th century. I fell into a rabbit hole of reading about wine vintages, and saw that the combination of hard and soft info, history, geography and climate, is something I would seriously geek out on if there had been occasion for it. Anyway, am now convinced that in some parallel universes I am a wine buff/bore.
When the group get together in Spain, they are less appealing company for the reader, bickering at times, and bullying Robert Cohn - whom the group, but Mike especially, keep defining by his Jewishness. Mike, despite several people saying he's nice (are they trying to convince themselves?) is generally hopeless and also an arsehole. He would rather be in a monogamous relationship with his fiancée Brett, so he's bitter towards men she has slept with, but with Robert it's not just that, it's clearly antisemitism as well. The exasperating frequency of the bullying drives home points from the very first chapter, which focused on how difficult it was to fit in early 20th century upper-middle class circles if one was Jewish, regardless of an Ivy League education and learning to box.
The bullfighting made me think of the cattle sacrifices in the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the latter which a friend had very recently reviewed. (Only in the bull runs there are, in effect, humans sacrificed too.) There is a lot in the novel's bullfighting scenes about human movement and reactions, and negligible animal gore. A few weeks ago, I read several articles about the Mesoamerican ballgame for some reason that now escapes me, and in The Sun Also Rises I felt like I was reading about a similar ritualised ancient sport, rather than something in the category bloodsports. I actually felt more of a sense of pain from the fishing in an earlier chapter. And so I found myself thinking about the performative nature of criticising issues and representation in novels; how there are some scenes or issues one really feels; whilst in reaction to others one simply notes 'wrong' as if it were an incorrect answer to a sum - but because of the overt or implicit expectations of online friends, or anticipated comments, one feels obliged to mention how the subject is handled in the book. And then there are those where even reactions are Expectations around animal issues are more varied than most. The other day one GR friend observed critically in a review that more people had talked about the animal cruelty in a book than the domestic abuse. Whilst a former GR friend who has now left the site discussed the animal exploitation of H Is for Hawk among other books, and how many readers don't consider that; around that time, I am not sure I would have felt able to react as I did yesterday to The Sun Also Rises, and may have written about it differently.
The bickering and bullfighting in Pamplona are bookended by time in other locations, which are considerably more pleasant for the characters. Jake's plan for a quiet time on his own in San Sebastian after the drama of the fiesta would be an ideal holiday. And during his and Bill's fishing trip to Roncesvalles at the beginning of their time in Spain: it was fascinating to hear about the atmosphere and cold at this historic site and setting of the Song of Roland, and have a good time with an English chap called Harris who's also there for the fishing. English characters in the novel - but Harris more than most - speak like they walked out of a P.G. Wodehouse book, and Jake observes how they use so few words to mean different things:
What rot, I could hear Brett say it. What rot! When you were with English you got into the habit of using English expressions in your thinking. The English spoken language—the upper classes, anyway—must have fewer words than the Eskimo. Of course I didn’t know anything about the Eskimo. Maybe the Eskimo was a fine language. Say the Cherokee. I didn’t know anything about the Cherokee, either. The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything. I liked them, though. I liked the way they talked. Take Harris. Still Harris was not the upper classes.
(An interesting mixture of colonial attitudes whilst simultaneously realising how limited they are; you can almost see the cultural cogs beginning to move, here in the 1920s.)
The Sun Also Rises, nearly 100 years old now, is strangely modern at times - also see the mundane dialogue which can feel modernist/experimental, and the way the characters hardly change - and this can make it jarringly old-fashioned when it isn't. (Yes, this is defo your [great-] grandad's humour and slang sometimes.) It's high time it got an edition with notes - I thought the same about Faulkner; due, presumably to rights issues, neither he nor Hemingway have Penguin or Oxford UK editions as yet. Whilst Hemingway's phrasing is famously simpler, there are enough dated slang phrases and allusions here (especially in conversations between Jake and Bill, for some reason) that the book could benefit from notes. Overall, I liked it, though I'm not sure I'd enjoy this unadorned style in a much longer book, and this pushes any more voluminous Hemingway a little further down my TBR.
(read May-June 2020, reviewed June)
Sept: I re-read The Story of Ferdinand to get a reading challenge category out of the way, and because I thought it might be an interesting comparison with this. (It's possible to read Ferdinand as a response to Hemingway's novel.) Also, as I was writing one sentence, it twigged that the title of Kingsley Amis's Jake's Thing - a novel which, it seems to be agreed, has not aged well - may have been inspired by The Sun Also Rises.
Part 1, in which a mixed group of young expat characters hang out in Paris, had an atmosphere which reminded me a lot of being in London in the 00s with a crowd likewise in our late twenties or early thirties. The characters, through the lens of narrator Jake Barnes, have a cynicism, a disdain for the idea of being shocked, and a determination to enjoy themselves whilst knowing it's all a bit meaningless, which I recognised deeply. I wouldn't be surprised if The Sun Also Rises had an impact on Strauss & Howe before they formulated their generational theory, as this novel is the first actual evidence I've seen that might lead to someone thinking of the Lost Generation and Gen X as similar - both being the 'Nomad' type of generation among their four categories despite these cohorts' very different experiences in youth.
Meyer notes that it's essentially a novel of trauma and its aftermath - which potentially provides another way into it for some of those who might jettison Hemingway entirely, but are interested in trauma. It also made interesting reading just now as the characters - as relatively well-off Anglos in 1924 - have put the global crisis of the Great War several years behind them (although they are still affected by it in the background, and in Jake's case physically too) and their cynicism and honesty creates a very different mood from the interweaving of anxiety, chirpy public-spirited rhetoric, and simmering irritability which apparently constitutes the present of one.
Brett Ashley was something of a revelation; if she'd been a character in a historical novel, I'd have thought she was an anachronism, that her role in this social group wouldn't have been possible until the 1980s. In Part 1 she seemed like a more stylish counterpart of a slightly older girl I looked up to at university, who was entirely accepted and respected as one of the boys in a crowd that was maybe 2/3 male, had slept with quite a few of them, was a big drinker apparently unfazed by anything, and was good-natured and funny. That sang-froid and jollity was the most crucial element of her character, far more than I realised in those days - it was that which really inspired respect, without it the other stuff would have looked different - and it's a quality Brett shares. However, unlike Brett Ashley, when the girl from university had a serious relationship, it was sensibly with someone who was barely an acquaintance of the group, and she was actually serious about it. It becomes clearer towards the end of Part 1 of the novel, and in full focus in Part 2, that while Brett is considered good company, and implicitly more of a man than Robert Cohn, that she creates emotional chaos for the central male characters by getting into relationships where at least three of them have fallen in love with her, which they bear with varying degrees of stoicism whilst she blithely moves on as she pleases, and maintains multiple flings despite being engaged. In this, and her glamorous appearance, she seems closer to the tabloid celebrity ladette. She knows what she's like - and that she has been shaken by the Great War and an abusive ex-husband - and she would seem well-suited to polyamory if only it had been around in those days. But it's not as if there weren't models of marginally less messy Bohemian relationship styles for an unconventional well-connected Englishwoman in those days, from the Bloomsbury group. Albeit they hadn't published a how-to…
Jake is apparently the most stoic, but because he's afflicted with a problem that he understandably doesn't want to talk about, and which would still be difficult to talk about now. It's never explained in graphic detail, but he evidently suffered some injury to his dick when his fighter plane crashed in the war, and he can't have sex. The other characters externalise their angst, with sex, fighting or money (though all of them drink a lot). Jake mostly doesn't talk about things and sublimates his masculinity into being a serious bullfighting aficionado. (This is partly that trope of the one white guy who's really great at something special to another ethnic group, even if it is merely fandom, and a reminder of how Spain was, until a few decades ago, exoticised and othered and poorer. But as his status may have become affected by his messy friends and their drama, it's not that simple.)
The characters are considerably richer than my friends were and at one point in Paris, somebody orders an 1811 brandy, which I found out was considered the greatest vintage of the 19th century. I fell into a rabbit hole of reading about wine vintages, and saw that the combination of hard and soft info, history, geography and climate, is something I would seriously geek out on if there had been occasion for it. Anyway, am now convinced that in some parallel universes I am a wine buff/bore.
When the group get together in Spain, they are less appealing company for the reader, bickering at times, and bullying Robert Cohn - whom the group, but Mike especially, keep defining by his Jewishness. Mike, despite several people saying he's nice (are they trying to convince themselves?) is generally hopeless and also an arsehole. He would rather be in a monogamous relationship with his fiancée Brett, so he's bitter towards men she has slept with, but with Robert it's not just that, it's clearly antisemitism as well. The exasperating frequency of the bullying drives home points from the very first chapter, which focused on how difficult it was to fit in early 20th century upper-middle class circles if one was Jewish, regardless of an Ivy League education and learning to box.
The bullfighting made me think of the cattle sacrifices in the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the latter which a friend had very recently reviewed. (Only in the bull runs there are, in effect, humans sacrificed too.) There is a lot in the novel's bullfighting scenes about human movement and reactions, and negligible animal gore. A few weeks ago, I read several articles about the Mesoamerican ballgame for some reason that now escapes me, and in The Sun Also Rises I felt like I was reading about a similar ritualised ancient sport, rather than something in the category bloodsports. I actually felt more of a sense of pain from the fishing in an earlier chapter. And so I found myself thinking about the performative nature of criticising issues and representation in novels; how there are some scenes or issues one really feels; whilst in reaction to others one simply notes 'wrong' as if it were an incorrect answer to a sum - but because of the overt or implicit expectations of online friends, or anticipated comments, one feels obliged to mention how the subject is handled in the book. And then there are those where even reactions are Expectations around animal issues are more varied than most. The other day one GR friend observed critically in a review that more people had talked about the animal cruelty in a book than the domestic abuse. Whilst a former GR friend who has now left the site discussed the animal exploitation of H Is for Hawk among other books, and how many readers don't consider that; around that time, I am not sure I would have felt able to react as I did yesterday to The Sun Also Rises, and may have written about it differently.
The bickering and bullfighting in Pamplona are bookended by time in other locations, which are considerably more pleasant for the characters. Jake's plan for a quiet time on his own in San Sebastian after the drama of the fiesta would be an ideal holiday. And during his and Bill's fishing trip to Roncesvalles at the beginning of their time in Spain: it was fascinating to hear about the atmosphere and cold at this historic site and setting of the Song of Roland, and have a good time with an English chap called Harris who's also there for the fishing. English characters in the novel - but Harris more than most - speak like they walked out of a P.G. Wodehouse book, and Jake observes how they use so few words to mean different things:
What rot, I could hear Brett say it. What rot! When you were with English you got into the habit of using English expressions in your thinking. The English spoken language—the upper classes, anyway—must have fewer words than the Eskimo. Of course I didn’t know anything about the Eskimo. Maybe the Eskimo was a fine language. Say the Cherokee. I didn’t know anything about the Cherokee, either. The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything. I liked them, though. I liked the way they talked. Take Harris. Still Harris was not the upper classes.
(An interesting mixture of colonial attitudes whilst simultaneously realising how limited they are; you can almost see the cultural cogs beginning to move, here in the 1920s.)
The Sun Also Rises, nearly 100 years old now, is strangely modern at times - also see the mundane dialogue which can feel modernist/experimental, and the way the characters hardly change - and this can make it jarringly old-fashioned when it isn't. (Yes, this is defo your [great-] grandad's humour and slang sometimes.) It's high time it got an edition with notes - I thought the same about Faulkner; due, presumably to rights issues, neither he nor Hemingway have Penguin or Oxford UK editions as yet. Whilst Hemingway's phrasing is famously simpler, there are enough dated slang phrases and allusions here (especially in conversations between Jake and Bill, for some reason) that the book could benefit from notes. Overall, I liked it, though I'm not sure I'd enjoy this unadorned style in a much longer book, and this pushes any more voluminous Hemingway a little further down my TBR.
(read May-June 2020, reviewed June)
Sept: I re-read The Story of Ferdinand to get a reading challenge category out of the way, and because I thought it might be an interesting comparison with this. (It's possible to read Ferdinand as a response to Hemingway's novel.) Also, as I was writing one sentence, it twigged that the title of Kingsley Amis's Jake's Thing - a novel which, it seems to be agreed, has not aged well - may have been inspired by The Sun Also Rises.
