The Sun Also Rises

A magnificent and deceptively simple book. If you judged it solely on its plot, you probably wouldn't come away very impressed: a collection of American ex-patriots travel from Paris to Pamplona for the running of the bulls; drink too much and make fools of themselves; then return to Paris a few weeks older and not much wiser. Where Hemingway really succeeds, though, is in capturing brief flashes of life that any reader will recognize.

Again, I'm hardly qualified to propose and defend a thesis on the book, so I'll write about what impressed me. To start, of course, there are all the scenes that describe the art and beauty of bullfighting. Hemingway makes it sound like a fierce and graceful competition between humanity and nature. I have to say, however, that when I actually saw a bullfight I didn't come away with that impression at all. The odds are (understandably) so stacked in favor of the bullfighter that the whole process seems more savage and brutal than anything else. Still, it was Hemingway's description that drew me to see the match in the first place, so it carries a great deal of romantic power. Beautiful to read, horrible to see.

There is also a scene where two of the characters go off to a small village to fish before the Running of the Bulls feast. The description of the guys hanging out, lazily fishing, and waiting for their bottles of wine to cool in the river really captures those moments in life where you stand back from yourself for a moment, look around, and say to yourself: "Goddamn! It's good to be alive!" Makes you want to go out there and fish yourself.

Finally, Hemingway really conveys the wild revelry of the feast itself. The writing comes in flashes, like memories of a great night out. Dancing with locals in a tavern. Sharing a wineskin while traveling between bars. Fumbling with your keys as you try to get back in your room. Trying to recover fast enough the next morning to start all over again that night. The book focuses on the consequences of this kind of lifestyle, as well, but being a half-full glass kind of guy draws me to the more enjoyable aspects of the book. An enormously fun read.

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.

The Sun Also Rises is the story of a "lost generation", a group of British and American ex-pats who were ex-servicemen of World War I. Being himself belonging to this lost generation, Hemingway digs deep into their lives subtly exposing and bringing to light the true nature of that generation. He points out that despite the irretrievable physical and emotional damages they have faced, these men have braved their lives with sheer courage and have lived as normal a life as possible under the circumstances.

The story takes you through a colorful journey with the main protagonist Jake Barnes and his friends on Paris cafes, French food; on Bayonne and fishing; and finally, on Pamplona and bullfighting, all the time bringing out in slow measures the hidden characteristics of these characters.

The character of Lady Brett is the center of the story. She is Hemingway's easel in which he paints his story with such mastery. Through her, Hemingway exhibits two important points: One is the concept of the "modern woman", who no longer lives according to social norms defining her own rules based on freedom. Second is the sexual tension and sexual frustration of men when attraction and denial are played at close proximity. Through the characters of Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn, this point is subtly exposed.

There is also another interesting feature in the story; that is the nothingness these characters feel, living day to day, trying desperately to find a solid ground to anchor their wandering lives. This point is even true today. It is not only the "lost generation" but even the modern generation find them victims of this nothingness. And to that extent, the story is timeless.

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...“

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.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises: "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton".

This phrase sums up the relationship between the narrator and his subject, Mr. Cohn quite perfectly. He shows the Robert's glory was pretty mediocre ("middleweight") and a long time ago ("once") and not actual. It also shows the pretentiousness of the character through the association with Princeton. It is almost the prototypical Hemmingway prose as well being dry and direct and to the point. The reference to boxing which is a violent, masculine sport, gives us an inkling of the bull fighting that will become the center of this early 20th century masterpiece.

The relationship between Jake and Brett is an old one of disappointment and resignation, Brett always doomed to make poor decisions and Jake always doomed to clean up the messes she leaves behind.

The great irony I find in Hemingway is that he uses a very direct language with a limited vocabulary and repetition, and yet there is an incredible subtlety here. Jake’s wartime injury castrated him, but we only learn this by inference: when Georgette tries to touch him there, he moves her hand away and says he’s sick, later with Brett their contact is limited to kisses and he cries when she leaves him, he observes himself naked in the mirror in his room and only then does he talk in roundabout terms about getting injured in the war and how the other officers made a joke about it. As a result of this castration, and his inbred anti-Semitism, he acts as a entremetteur in trying to tempt his erstwhile friend Robert Cohn into infidelity at the beginning of the book when he mentions the girl in Strasbourg in front of his wife, Frances. Tragically, this playing matchmaker later backfires on him when he learns that Brett has spent a weekend in Bayonne with Robert rather than coming to Spain with him.

It is admittedly upsetting to see Hemingway’s anti-Semitism in his description of how Robert had “ a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak.” (p. 10) There is also unveiled homophobia in Jake’s hostile reaction to the gay men with whom Brett shows up to the bal musette in the Latin quarter: “Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you are should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.” (p. 20) Note the alliteration there, “ swing, shatter, superior, simpering”; that is one of the great markers of Hemingway’s writing that makes one want to forgive him for his many many faults. In that same section, the phrase “with them was Brett” is repeated twice reemphasizing how Jake’s sudden feeling of violence is tied up in his own impotence - they are gay and will not make love to her either, but this just reminds him of how much he would like to making him more angry. It is a lot to unpack, but the terse prose brings out all this nervousness in the words themselves.

I had forgotten that most of the novel takes place in Paris entre-guerres and recall that the first time I read this 3 decades ago or more, I had never seen much less dreamed of living in Paris. And so it goes.

Late in the book when Jake returns briefly to France before a final return to Spain, he makes a comment about French servers not having a “my friend” attitude and that you get what you pay for - I have found this to be the case and despite my past annoyance with arrogant French service, it is true that pedantic, over-friendly service elsewhere in desperate attempts to solicit a tip is even more annoying.

I love Papa’s writing: the spartan use of language, the evocation of things in such an abbreviated, staccato manner…and I had also forgotten how much drinking goes on in this book!

One day before I am too old, I truly want to see a bullfight in Pamplona. Some day….

Don't miss my review of the Meyer biography of Hemingway: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A MAN IN SPAIN HE GETS FRIENDZONED.