This may be my favorite book of all time. At any rate, it's definitely on the top ten list and by far my favorite Hemingway (and I do love some Hemingway). The first time I read this, I loved Lady Brett Ashley. Is she a bitch? Sure, but I don't think she ever intentionally sets out to hurt anyone. And it might be argued that she has reason to be one: her first true love dies in the war from dysentery (not exactly the most noble of deaths) and she's physically threatened by Lord Ashley, forced to sleep on the floor beside him and his loaded gun (and let's clarify that,no, that's not a euphemism, just in case you're a perv). Then we have the one man who might make her happy, Jake Barnes. Poor, poor Jake, who doesn't have a gun, let alone a loaded one (yup, that's a euphemism--snicker away). I think Brett is one of the most tragic figures in American literature. Disillusioned by the war and how it irrevocably changed her life, she tries to fill the void with alcohol and sex--and destroys herself in the process.

However, upon rereading the novel, I realized how eclipsed Jake had been by Brett during my first reading. I also realized how I had misinterpreted him during my first reading. I thought Jake was as lost as the rest of the "Lost Generation," but I now believe that he is the only one who is not lost (with the exception of Bill Gorton, whose line "The road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs" may be my favorite in the book). If there's anyone with reason to give up on life, it's Jake. Does he pine for Brett? Yes. Does he come to hate Cohn for his affair with Brett? Affirmative. Does he get over Brett and realize that, even if properly equipped for a sexual relationship, a relationship with her would end as tragically as all of her other conquests? Abso-damn-lutely. After all, Brett is Circe, according to Cohn, and anyone lured into her bed will lose their manhood. The success of the relationship between Brett and Jake hinges on the fact that Jake literally has nothing to lose in this respect.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder

"Why are you going away?"
"Better for you. Better for me."

This is a bitter novel that charts the disillusionment and spiritual hollowness of the 'lost generation' between the wars. At the heart of the book is an exposé of failed or spoiled masculinity: the young, squabbling and frequently drunk Americans who all flock around Brett Ashley are contrasted with the young matador, Pedro Romero, whose grace and purity in the bull-fight only serve to show up their inadequacies, symbolised by the literal (though never quite mentioned) impotence of Jake, wounded in WW1.

For all Hemingway's famous terseness, this feels padded with quite a lot of filler: the Parisian travelogue that faithfully name-drops every boulevard and café, for example; and really comes to life for me in the tensions that exist in the brittle relationship between Brett and Jake.

Here Hemingway imbues each scene with a wonderful resonance so that the most careless sounding words carry a weight beyond their superficial appearance. And Brett is a good antidote to people who say Hemingway can't write women: beautiful and restless, unfulfilled and damaged, Brett looks like a radiant, short-haired 'Bright Young Thing' but that surface shine hides a wealth of experience that leaves her world-weary and emptied out. I just wish there hadn't been quite so much stuff surrounding this central relationship between her and Jake.

Like one of those disappointing stories a friend tells and then ends with a shrug and a "I guess you had to be there."

3 stars. Sure, it's a significant milestone in American fiction. But I fear I came upon it too late in my reading career to be fully impressed by its accomplishments, having seen what's since been borne along in its wake. For all its strengths, I don't much enjoy the lackadaisical plot (non-plot) of ambling around town from cafe to cafe and having chats over drinks. Impressive style, interesting counterpoint to the literature that came before, but still in my opinion pretty dull.

داستان زندگی پر زرق و برق و خوش گذرانی های عده ای روزنامه نگار و نویسنده در پاریس بعد از جنگ جهانی اول
سعی من برای لذت بردن از این کتاب بار ها بی نتیجه موند، هرچند که توصیفات پاریس و اسپانیای بعد از جنگ و شرایط زندگی خاص و دقیق بود و باعث شد کتاب رو ادامه بدم، ولی من به دنبال داستان مستحکمی بودم که وجود نداشت.
عمق کتاب زخم خوردگی های روحی بعد از جنگ و پوچی زندگی "نسل گمشده " ی بعد از جنگ بود

I suppose this is going to strike some people as being one of my confused reviews. This happens when the writing and intelligence, or experimental courage, floor me with amazement, but the actual ideas disgust me, or the characters are too horrible for me. Part of me is full of admiration for the original brain and/or talent; another part of me is excreting bricks to throw at the author.

Hemingway is one of those authors for me. It's not just this book or that book - it's his entire philosophy of life.He was such an extraordinary witness to everything and everybody around him. He seems to have been an extremely curious person of high energy, willing to do whatever it took to experience every adventure possible. What makes him worthy of a superstar status is how well he writes of what he sees.

However, Hemingway was an ignorant and arrogant fool about what makes being a human worthy of being human. That led him to scorn the variety of being human for all of the wrong reasons. It appears Hemingway strove mightily to become something similar to the John Wayne image. (By the way, according to Wikipedia, the actor John Wayne, whose real name was Marion Morrison, while more complex than his movie character, seems to have had a similar life outlook as Hemingway.)

In Hemingway's worldview, the definition of being a Man can encompass only one definition, and a true woman is defined with only one definition of Woman - one permanent universal role to each allowed. To me, this intentional limiting of gender roles can only cause crippled personalities. It is an emotional blindness that some people seem to have. Life is rewarding to Hemingway only if it doesn’t lead to the Greatest Sin in his mindset- being disrespectful to the single image of being a Man that he thinks is permitted. Anything that deviates from this rigid definition of maleness is suspect and shaming and lowly. No excuses.

Hemingway’s enthusiasm for there being only two pictures of people which represent the apex of perfection of humanity, yet his ability to see unblinkered and clearly the huge variety of real people, must have been as tormenting to him as crookedly hung pictures are to obsessive-compulsives. (It struck me how he might have been a believer of Plato's metaphysics.)

The first chapter in the novel is a history and analysis of a pivotal character - Robert Cohn.  Is Cohn meant to be a character mirroring the poor bulls who are bravely and futilely defying death in the bullfighting ring, but in reverse, as in being a metaphorical steer? Doomed by his inescapable nature?  Cohn begins his friendship with the actual narrator of the story, Jacob Barnes, in Paris after Cohn's divorce from his wife, Francis. Jacob Barnes is an intellectual and a journalist. I think the character Barnes is EH's avatar since his background and beliefs mirror the author's from what I know about Hemingway.

While Barnes is a perceptive observer of the lives of his friends and an exceptional bon vivant, fueled by copious amounts of wine, he is drifting from social event to social event. He works to be able to live, rather than live to work. However, Barnes seems to be losing purpose. He brings along a prostitute, Georgette, to a cafe table of friends, introducing her as his fiancée, in a moment of boredom. Barnes leaves Georgette to fend for herself and walks over to the bar to get a drink. There, he runs into Lady Brett Ashley. The character of Brett is an elemental force of sexuality, a powerful goddess of love disguised - but she is a poisoned goddess, jaded and reluctant to commit. She is the lover of every man in the book; however she clearly is not cut from the same cloth as Georgette. For one thing, Brett is a real titled Lady, from a previous marriage. Cohn meets her at this occasion, and becomes an obsessed man. But Barnes is the man who leaves with Brett. Barnes thinks "She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes." In conversation, she says being in love is "....hell on earth."

Love causes ruptures between the friends after Jake and Bill Gorton decide on a trip to Spain for fishing and the bullfighting fiesta at Pamplona. They travel with Brett and Michael Campbell, Brett’s latest fiancé. Cohn follows.

At this point, the novel is a journey of 'Days of Wine and Roses' with great locales and many drunks. No one minds that alcohol is messing up their fun, with the exception of a hotel owner, Montoya. He sees that all of the men in the Barnes party become distracted and disputatious with the competing for the privilege of Brett's company.

The incident of the loss of Montoya's regard is barely mentioned, but to me, it was HUGE. When we meet Montoya, Barnes and his friends are checking into his hotel at Pamplona for the fiesta and bullfighting. Montoya and Barnes share a deep understanding about bull-fights. They both are aficionados - one who is passionate about the killing of the bulls. It is a spiritual, numinous event; something not overly discussed unless approached in undertones while talking about the expertise of the matadors and customs of the killing. As Barnes says about Montoya, "For one who had aficion he could forgive anything. At once he forgave me all my friends. Without his ever saying anything they were simply a little something shameful between us, like the spilling open of the horses in bull-fighting."

By the end of the book, Montoya is avoiding Barnes. The purity of their love of bull-fighting is no longer a shared emotion between them. Montoya believes that Barnes has tainted his experience of the blood sport, I think. I agree that Barnes is sliding into moral decay, and that his infatuation with Brett is a primary indication of growing dissolution, as well as a partial cause.

Hemingway's linkage of death sports, especially bullfighting, to religious ecstasy and moral purity is twisted, in my opinion. It reminds me of the 'precious bodily fluids' joke in 'Dr. Strangelove' , the famous movie. To me, it very clearly demonstrates this mistaken belief about how to live an examined life of meaning that led Hemingway to his failed marriages and suicide. He tried to build his moral self-regard on a moral singularity of sorts. I think the complexity of people makes this crazy-making. To reduce oneself to one feeling of manliness, rather than accept the songs of myself (Walt Whitman's poem, 'Leaves of Grass'.). Hemingway seemed to conduct his life on an endless search for concreteness and closure through death sports - he appeared unable to give up his idea that this rigid definition of being a Man would lead him to purity of being, and that being a Man of blood sport was the only reason to be alive with self-respect. Of course, Hemingway's war experience could be the initiating cause. He was an ambulance driver, among other things.

Walt Whitman also was an ambulance driver (in the American Civil War) -ironic, eh?

Brett loves the killing of the bulls. Plus, she has no problem with the eviscerating of the innocent horses, who obey their riders trusting their guidance in the ring, unaware of their actual purpose to 'incidentally' die of being gored, guts ripped out, by the bull, if it was considered necessary in winding up the bull to fury while protecting the matador. The crowd looks always to the bull. The horses' death are like the unnoticed sky above the heads of the spectators. I consider this depraved.

Brett is also unable to sit in a church without discomfort and squirms, eventually bolting outside before the end of the service. She is not only Eve, but the snake that destroys the state of innocence and purity in The Garden of Eden.

Hemingway was a man who 'loved' women without much trusting or liking them, I think. He consistently uses fictional women in the destroyer roles in his books, but not in a clean way. I feel he thinks of women as unclean stealers of bodily fluids - testosterone.


I think this is a wonderful book, but a lousy novel.

During the warm, friendly, tender hours of the evening twilight, as the day’s burdens slowly drifted away, my attention was redirected towards F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. As an alleged friend and supporter of Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald suggested a number of revisions to The Sun Also Rises.

“Anyhow I think parts of Sun Also are careless + ineffectual.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

My curiosity was piqued. Would the impressionable Hemingway accept these review points or reject them?

I had to find out! Investigation hats on!

The Sun Also Rises is set shortly after World War I where a group of riotous expats (Robert Cohn, Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Bill Gorton, Mike Campbell) find themselves living in Paris with imbibing being the order of the day. After some time, the group decides to gallivant to Spain to experience the bull-fighting season and other largely forgettable activities. However, as so often happens when excess alcohol is involved, many of the characters behave badly.

While Hemingway struggles to balance dialogue with descriptive prose, The Sun Also Rises hits many of the right notes.

There are some gorgeous lines:

“I like him. But he’s just so awful.”

“Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody.”

“It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent from happening.”

Interestingly, some of the characters in The Sun Also Rises are based off real-life people. Lady Brett Ashley was inspired by Duff Twysden, and Hemingway struck up a friendship with hotelier, Juanito Quintana who shared his knowledge of bull fighting and ran the now-defunct Hotel Quintana. He is the inspiration behind Montoya and the Montoya Hotel.

The Prince of Wales was mentioned in relation to a medal-awarding ceremony. Now, earlier this month, I was reading out of The Great Gatsby manuscript, and there is a certain section that did not make it into the published book—a passage about a rumor that the Prince of Wales was using dope. Who was the Prince of Wales at this point in history you ask? Edward VIII, the gentleman who ended up abdicating to marry an American divorcee.

Despite the uneven pacing, the symbolism in the last half of the book was worth the endurance. Tip: You may want to look up the difference between a bull and a steer.

Some sections were slow—the fishing scene was particularly boring and seemed only to exist to make the point that someone had the bigger fish. Tee hee.

What did the great F. Scott Fitzgerald really think of The Sun Also Rises?

This two-faced friend of Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, the editor for both Fitzgerald and Hemingway at Scribner:

“I liked it but with certain qualifications. The fiesta, the fishing trip, the minor characters were fine. The lady I didn’t like, perhaps because I don’t like the original. In the mutilated man I thought Ernest bit off more than can yet be chewn between the covers of a book, then lost his nerve a little and edited the more vitalizing details out. He has since told me that something like this happened.”

Hemingway had had enough of Fitzgerald’s “help.” When Fitzgerald tried to send another set of review notes for Hemingway’s next novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway wrote on the letter, “Kiss my ***” and largely ignored his advice.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text - $82.32 at Abe Books for a First Edition Library copy
Audiobook - Free through Libby

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MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
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AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
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NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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This book should be called “The Impotence of Being Ernest.” Anyway...

Thank God for Hemmingway. His particular form of insanity is so sane. It’s an insanity that at least gets strait to the point.

It’s hard to know where to begin with a book like this. On its face, it is underwhelming, almost boring. A bunch of rich Americans waste their time and money while destroying their livers. And Hemmingway’s sparse prose doesn’t even give you a good visual.

But the key to this book is what Hemmingway chooses not to say. It’s incredible really. He manages to deal with complex themes by just hinting at them. He respects the reader’s intelligence by assuming that his audience can do the work and put it together. An added bonus to this approach is that is gives readers more leeway in what they take away. He doesn’t hit them over the head with a moral.

At a time when T.S. Eliot and James Joyce were composing works that required the Encyclopedia Britanica to understand, Hemmingway gave us this. We should be grateful.

✍

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!

I’m sitting here in my balcony right around sunset with a bowl of peanuts in front of me and a mug of iced tea in my hand and I’m suddenly thinking to myself I could be in Spain right now. But oddly, it doesn’t seem to appeal to me at all. I’m somewhat annoyed by the possibility of another busy week looming just ahead of me. Wait, scratch that, not possibility but certainty. I’m grossly evading any academic assignment I might have had and am feeling more potent knowing that I’m above it all. Really, the amount of paperwork I have is insanely comical. I’m really considering dropping out of the university out of indolence. I could really use a breather right now. But gallivanting in Spain with a bunch of alcoholic ex-pats? I dunno. There might have been a time when that would have sounded sexy and chic, but those times have passed. Really, I was more interested in the art of bullfighting than the misadventures of Jake and the gang. I had no idea why I wasn’t as keen as I normally was in reading this Hemingway. Is it Hemingway’s prose? God, no. Is it me? Is it the generational gap that led to my indifference? Maybe. Is it all the absinthe? I can’t say, I haven’t been alcohol’s best friend as of late, but it doesn’t seem enough to actually estrange me from literature. Hmmm... What’s my problem then? Till now, I’m actually not sure. It might be the seeming pointlessness of the book, just a drunken adventure after another with no closure at all. But that’s arguable. I get the whole lost generation thing, but I can’t say that it strikes me as particularly redemptive to them. I know that Hemingway wrote this book to contradict Gertrude Stein, to sort of imply that the lost generation wasn’t really lost at all. He put the passage from Ecclesiastes quoting that “one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh… but the earth abideth forever” and “the sun also rises” to signify that no generation was really lost but that they tread on and live despite all the misfortunes and war put in their way. But coping with life through alcohol and endless vacation seems a bit too escapist for me. I don’t want to get preachy, but even I know that’s the life homeless welfare people lead. Well, if you’re looking for escapism, then voilà! Here you go. But, really it’s not the type of book that sends a good message, or even gives you a snippet of wisdom. Maybe, dear old Ernest wrote it thinking here’s how not to cope with a scarred-life, but I very much doubt that. Then again, it might be the only way a man can live without his penis, or a woman can live without her sense of fidelity. Sure, these are broken people scarred by war, rejection, and some just out of plain foolishness, but I hardly think that living such unkempt lives is a result of their lack of childhood. Maybe it is. Maybe, they contained their playfulness all those times of war and now that they’re adults, they’ve channeled it into their lives somehow. But this is all speculation; Ernie didn’t develop his characters beyond their usual desire for an aperitif and a good fuck. Who cares about the psychological well-being of a bunch of alcoholics anyway? Clearly not the author, so why should I care too? Maybe I’m overthinking this stuff. Maybe this was written basically to entertain, and I wasn’t entertained much. I guess that’s what it all boils down to. The fiesta was really something though. I would still have read it just for that. If you want to read this book, good. Don’t let me deter you. If you’ve read this and loved it, great. But, if I changed your opinion in anyway, then let me offer you this excerpt.

“While we were waiting I saw a cockroach on the parquet floor that must have been at least three inches long. I pointed him out to Bill and then put my shoe on him. We agreed that it must have just come from the garden. It was really an awfully clean hotel.”

That really made me laugh. The free flow of this book, I guess, is what gives it appeal. But the fact that it can have a cockroach type of conversation shows you the general aimlessness of it. With no resolve whatsoever, I’m treating this book as a cockroach from the garden. Hemingway was fairly young when he wrote this, and I know it’s gained popularity because of the lost generation and the total abandonment of responsibility in their adventures thus making it a perfect escapist book, but I simply feel that this is inferior to my previous Hemingways: A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea. Still, a sub-par from Hemingway is preferable to the average piece of junk you see in the best-seller shelves these days. Alas, he did better.

The sun also rises when you have a particularly bad hangover and it glares at you till you go blind. Well, at least you had some semblance of fun drinking the night before, or so you think.

راوی داستان جیکوب بارنز از زندگی خودش و دوستانش ابتدا در پاریس و سپس در سفری به اسپانیا صحبت می‌کنه، زندگی‌ای که پر از مشروب و رابطه و خوشگذرانی‌ست برای فرار از تلخی زندگی پس از جنگ. حرف پنهان در لابه‌لای کتاب خوبه اما چارچوب داستانی کتاب جذاب نیست و البته من از طرفداران همینگوی نیستم. در واقع میشه گفت به جای رمان با یک شبه سفرنامه‌ی کنایی طرف هستیم که بسیاری از اوقات ملال‌آور میشه اما از ارزش اخلاقی کتاب نمیشه چشم پوشید. سخنان مترجم (احمد کسایی‌پور) بسیار روشنگر و کمک کننده در درک بهتر کتاب بود و به نظرم این نکته‌ی مثبتی برای یک کتاب نیست، کتابی که برای فهم حرفش نیاز به توضیح بقیه داره. ه

Such a boring book. I get that Hemingway captures the decadence and dissolution of the Lost Generation. I get that his writing style brings to mind adjectives like "sparse" and "blunt" and "elegiac." But I do not get how to find enjoyment from such a repetitive book that glamorizes violence, excessive drinking, outdated forms of masculinity, homophobia, and antisemitism. One could argue that Hemingway reports these toxic ideas as ideals of the time, but even then, he does nothing special with his story to rise above the trials of the 1920s. I also cannot forgive his monotonous and mind-numbing prose. As I said in another review, if an author without Hemingway's name tried to get by with this style of writing, I doubt they would succeed.