The Sun Also Rises

Jake Barnes was injured in WWI. His injury might have rendered him impotent. This could be the reason why he drinks so much. Jake drinks a lot of alcohol. So does his companion Lady Brett Ashley. She and Jake seem to love each other, but some obstacles are in their way. Alcohol. Money. His lack of confidence. Her fickleness. Lady Brett Ashley is in the process of getting a divorce so she can marry a bankrupt Scottish guy named Mike. Mike also enjoys drinking a lot of alcohol. Alcohol helps him suppress his jealousy when Brett has dalliances with Robert Cohn, a Jewish writer and a Princeton graduate who is a trained boxer, and a young Spanish toreador named Romero. Jake’s friend Bill also hangs around.They travel from Paris to Spain and back again. They mainly drink and eat a lot. They also mock each other frequently and overuse words like “daunting” and “ironical” in their conversations. They enjoy the fiesta in Pamplona. During the fiesta, they watch the running of the bulls and a few bullfights. During the bullfights, Lady Brett Ashley becomes smitten with the bullfighter Romero. They run off together, but it doesn’t last. This story is pretty much a soap opera set against the backdrop of post-WWI Europe.Because of its setting and its focus on what Gertrude Stein described as the “lost generation” of American expatriates living hedonistically in Europe after the Great War, this novel—Hemingway’s first—has been called one of the greatest works of American literature ever written. I do not necessarily agree, perhaps because of Hemingway’s trademark stark writing style and simple sentence structure, which I have attempted to reproduce in this review. It can get annoying, can’t it?

One of my favorite novels. Always in my top five lists of all time. The novel that I have probably read the most times. Hemingway is what I like to call a "thinking man's author." Unless you are willing to think beyond the written word you will never fully appreciate the brilliance of Mr. Hemingway. In "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms"(not to mention his great short stories) this concept of thinking beyond the written word is most prevalent and most masterfully displayed. Every single character in "The Sun Also Rises"is a mystery and, after finishing the novel, one is left thinking "I wonder what happened next to that character."Lady Ashley is my favorite female character in all of literature. She is real, uncompromising, and yet a mystery to the very end. She is a siren with a heart or maybe without a heart?Hemingway, unlike such great authors as Lawrence, Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy and Fitzgerald, could describe a scene, a setting, using half the words that these wonderful writers would use and yet be as poignant and vivid as any writer I have ever read. His descriptions of the bull fights at Pamplona and the fiesta are chilling and as splendid as anything I have had the pleasure to read.Tomorrow, July 2, marks the day Hemingway died. He once said, "The only thing a person takes with him when he dies, is what he left behind" and in his case he left behind brilliant novels and masterful short stories that never fail to amaze and astonish me.

. Written in the 1920's, the author and his friends would be termed the “lost generation” and it does suit them. Personally, at least for me I find Hemingway and his writing style, frankly over rated. The discourses between the characters are minimal and it's not so much what they are saying but what they aren't saying. They meet up, they drink to excess, they insult each other and have a row or two, they separate and travel back and forth from France to Spain. The author gives us peaceful moments when his narrator Jake Barnes goes on a fishing trip or swims in the ocean to the excitement of bull fighting and a fiesta. They dance, they party and tell themselves what a swell time it's been but was it? Was it ever enough for anyone in this group? When I finish the book, I'm left with the feeling, What the hell was that all about? I thought the characters were superficial, the never ending cycle of day after day, night after night of trying to satisfy that lust for life which is a delusion at best. Perhaps one day, I will acquire a taste for Hemingway but today is not that day. I will however give it a high score because I realize what bothers me about this novel is what will make me think often of it.

If one were taking a course on "The American Novel in the 20th Century", I'm sure Hemingway would be featured prominently. However, for pure reading enjoyment, "The Sun Also Rises" falls flat. We meet a cast of characters that are tedious, scheming and wholly unlikable. We are then presented with a story that is little more than the characters doing a few things in between extended bouts of drinking. This is simply another Hemingway exercise in "manly men", chasing "confused women" during the years between wars. I've never been particularly taken by his celebrated style of sparse writing. For depth of character, give me Steinbeck. For richness of story, Faulkner. And for artful concision, I'll take Vonnegut. Hemingway has, and should have, lost his place among relative American writers of the 20th century.

I finished this novel for the second time last night and felt compelled to write my first Hemingway review. I’ve been reading Hemingway for over 20 years, starting with For Whom The Bell Tolls in the mid-nineties, followed by the Old Man and the Sea on a trip to Cuba in 2001, where I visited the hotel that Hemingway stayed at before he bought his own place, and the two famous bars where he spent his days, the Floridita and the Bodegita del Medio. I’ve also read A Farewell to Arms and the complete short stories.Enough of that. The problem with Hemingway is he began his writing career in the 1920s when anti-Semitism and the use of the N word were acceptable, if not respectable. To be fair to Hemingway, in this novel the N word is only used when a character recounts a sympathetic anecdote about an African American boxer in dire straits in Vienna. However, the anti-Semitism is rife among several characters, and although the narrator is friends with Robert Cohn, the Jew in the novel, and is not overtly anti-Semitic himself, he doesn’t challenge the anti-Semitism of the other characters, which is a way of implying that it’s “OK”.This problem isn’t unique to Hemingway, and if we burned all the books that contain offensive references to women, Jews, gay people, Black people, an Amazon warehouseful of literature would go up in smoke. Yes, there are bits of this novel that make me wince, but I’ve found that’s the case with a great many books from this era, particularly American books. I read The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon a couple of years ago, after seeing both films a dozen times, and the novels both came out as surprisingly homophobic. Only after reading the novels did I detect traces of homophobia in the films (it had all gone over my head previously).The novel is about a group of American, English and Scottish ex-pats living in Paris in the 1920s. They are the “lost generation” who survived the Great War and are trying to rebuild their lives in exile with copious amounts of alcohol. It’s summer and they all decide to go down to Pamplona, Spain, for the fiesta. The narrator Jake Barnes and his mate Bill go first. They’re mad on fishing and bullfighting, so they go down to Spain and fish for trout for a few days and organise tickets for the bullfights that form the main attraction of the fiesta. The others come down later: the aristocratic Englishwoman, Lady Brett Ashley, and her Scottish fiancé, Mike Campbell, and the misfit, Robert Cohn, who has ditched his partner because he’s fallen for Brett. The fiesta presents opportunities for more drinking even than Paris, followed by conflict and violence as the group disintegrates.For me, there are two things that save Hemingway from the pyre: first, that over time his politics improved and he was on the right side of history in the Spanish Civil War and the Cuban Revolution. The second is the quality of his writing. All the stuff about hunting, fishing and bullfighting might seem overly macho and distasteful today, but it’s the way Hemingway writes about these things. His style seems so simple and direct – sometimes “manly” in the worst sense of the word – but underneath there is pounding emotion. This passage refers to a bull goring a bystander as it’s taken to the bullring. Later, a matador kills it in the ring and presents its ear to the novel’s heroine, Brett Ashley, who slept with him the previous night and the night after the bullfight:“The bull who killed Vicente Girones was named Bocanegra, was Number 118 of the bull-breeding establishment of Sanchez Taberno, and was killed by Pedro Romero as the third bull of that same afternoon. His ear was cut by popular acclamation and given to Pedro Romero, who, in turn, gave it to Brett, who wrapped it in a handkerchief belonging to myself, and left both ear and handkerchief, along with a number of Muratti cigarette-stubs, shoved far back in the drawer of the bed-table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya, in Pamplona.”One of the most remarkable things about this novel is that we have an impotent male narrator (result of a war wound) and a heroine who sleeps with three different men in the novel (one is her fiancé, the other two aren’t). Sexual power transferred from male to female. Difficult to explain for a writer who’s often dismissed as a misogynist. There’s no condemnation of Brett and you’re left with the feeling that she’s going to go on doing what she enjoys, whereas in too many novels by men women who like sex come to a bad end.Here’s another example where the narrator and his companions are watching a dance at a fiesta:“In front of us on a clear part of the street a company of boys were dancing. The steps were very intricate and their faces were intent and concentrated. They all looked down while they danced. Their rope-soled shoes tapped and spatted on the pavement. The toes touched. The balls of the feet touched. Then the music broke wildly and the step was finished and they were all dancing up the street.”The artistry here is in what’s not said. We don’t have a detailed description of what they were wearing or the moves of the dance. Hemingway focuses on their faces and feet, and even with my limited imagination I can see those dancers in front of me now.So, despite my misgivings about the N word and the anti-Semitism, I’m giving this book five stars. If you think you’ll be offended, don’t buy it; but if you want to see what made Hemingway such a brilliant story teller, take a punt.

My first taste of Hemingway and, honestly, i really have no idea what all the hype is about.The Sun Also Rises is nothing but rich-alcoholics-get-bored-with-Paris-so-go-off-to-a-fiesta-in-Spain-for-a-week-to-get-drunk-there-instead. They mostly do nothing but drink alcohol of various types and expenses of which Hemingway will inform you like any decent, decadent, wealthy alcoholic would. They eat when they get hungry, sleep when they feel they need to and watch a few bull fights; about which, Hemingway is rather keen to portray to the world that the local Spanish know him to be an “officianado”, and that everyone must accept that it’s the height of art and wonder to brutalise animals for the entertainment of drunks.Oh, and there’s lots of pathetic drunken arguments with pathetic drunken people arguing about other drunken people, or about people who won’t get drunk with them — with a good dose of antisemitism thrown in, which was only necessary if Hemingway was eager to portray his antisemitic credentials to the world as it bought absolutely nothing whatsoever to the actual story.Blah, blah, blah……mostly, it’s all just typical drunken alcoholic boring twaddle written down through the haze of a hangover the next morning.And now i can’t be bothered to write another word about Hemingway ever again, and i certainly won’t be reading any of his other books. I gave him a chance and he failed miserably — but failing miserably is what alcoholics do best.

This is my first ever Ernest Hemingway novel, and if it’s indicative of the rest of his work then it’ll be the last. I know Hemingway is (apparently) one of the “greatest writers evah” but I don’t care about that when reading the work of authors described as such.I read it all, but it was a struggle. Unpleasant, shallow, entitled people drink too much and complain a lot in Paris. Then they go to Spain- rinse and repeat. Nothing else happens.This is not a good book - it is boring and uneventful with unlikeable characters.

An oddly naive and adolescent style; "and then we went", "and it was nice", "I liked him, he was pleasant". Prudishness over Jake's shortcomings and Ashley's appetites. Casual anti-Semitism and racism. Lots of big boy's toys: drinking, hikng, fishing, bull-running, fist-fights, more drinking. Anthem for a lost generation or a group of over-privileged wasters on a bender?One of the most important pieces of Twentieth Century literature? No. The basis of Hemingway's stellar reputation? No. Is he better than his peer F. Scott Fitzgerald? No.

It is a very long time since I last read any Hemingway, however, I was prompted to take him up again after references to him in a biography of Ezra Pound.I found the writing style of Hemingway better than I had remembered. The short staccato sentences with lots of fast dialogue interspersed with rather good short descriptive passages is very engaging and makes for good pace. Hemingway is very clever at constructing dialogue between drunken friends and capturing the increasing malice as they slowly drift out of control. The writing was certainly a revolution in style and subject matter in its day and does clearly mark the beginning of the modern novel. It does not matter that the story of ‘The Sun Also Rises’ is almost completed reportage of one of many trips Hemingway made to Pamplona, this time in 1925 with a group of friends who became easily identifiable characters in his book. The Biblical title refers to the fact that the world ‘keeps on turning’ as events come and go. This is a good read and stands the test of time.Copies of this novel are quite difficult to obtain and although this Penguin imprint (Arrow Books) is adequate it is rather cheap and cheerful and small in size.