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	The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway Scribner, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 466 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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The novel that made me love Hemingway

Hemingway wrote like a man that knew he was going to be big. I absolutely enjoyed this novel cover to cover. Typically, I try to avoid 20th century American Literature (I read more British literature) but I tip my hat to Mr. Hemingway after reading this novel.

I have read that because this is his first novel there were multiple "flaws" throughout the novel. This may be true but in all honesty, as a struggling writer myself, I became enamored with the "lost generation" story as it unfolded. As the main synopsis indicates this is primarily a story about expatriates returned from the war and not knowing what to do with themselves. This is a story about loss. This is a story about addiction. This is a story about finding yourself in a torn apart society.

There are two beautifully written scenes. The first is a scene out in nature (Spanish wilderness) with the typical Hemingway fishing scene between two men that provides the most truthful dialogue of the entire novel. Since they are away from civilization the men are also somewhat free from the boxed-in feeling they felt in society. Absolutely beautifully written. Hemingway really knows how to tap into the human psyche.

The other scene takes place during the bullfighting season in Spain. Lady Ashley is like the bull with all the rest of the men around her as the steers. She becomes enamored with a spanish bullfighter and essentially leaves the other men she was somewhat dating for him. The scenes are well described and full of powerful emotions Hemingway is so good at describing.

All in all, what a fantastic novel. I gave this to my army boyfriend who absolutely loved it as well. It speaks volumes about the generation we are living in right now. Is generation X/Y a lost generation as well? Are we too inundated with problems that we cannot move forward as a society? READ IT. You will love it.

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Isn't it pretty to think so?

Perhaps it is some measure of how far American culture has fallen that a novel like the Sun Also Rises, depicting as it does people who are essentially lost and appear set to remain so for the rest of their distressing lives, appears paradisiacal. Who wouldn't enjoy a European vacation like Jake Barnes'? Especially those sections where he is alone in San Sabastian swimming, eating and drinking or fishing with Bill on the Irati River. Even Jake's life as a newspaperman in Paris, filled with long, lingering lunches, and visits by eccentric characters and hard-noised newspapermen with snappy, peppy comebacks, creates a picture that is far from alienating. This is, in some ways, part of the appeal of The Sun Also Rises. The nostalgia is contagious. Throughout the novel many of the characters have nostalgia for the First World War, a war which damaged them all physically, psychologically, or both. Compared to the muddle of civilian life in the 1920s, the simplicity of war's exigencies created a mix of nostalgia and forgetfulness. The same holds for us, the readers of The Sun Also Rises, the heirs to its vision of disillusionment. Our losses and extractions are so dramatic, our culture so debased, that The Sun's bleak landscape of loss is appealing, poetic, romantic.

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Rewards the Patient Reader

THE SUN ALSO RISES becomes airborne only after Hemingway establishes two characters. These are: Romero, the matador, who brings both excellence and integrity to his work; and Robert Cohn, a romantic who is in love with the alcoholic Lady Brett. When the powerful aspirations of these characters emerge in TSAR, the shallowness, emptiness, and cruelty of other characters--Jake Barnes, Bill Gorton, and Mike Campbell--finally comes into focus. Thereafter, TSAR is fabulous.

But before these values are established, Hemingway seems only to be telling a story about the superficial sociability of thirty-somethings in the 1920's. These characters drink too much and are incapable of love, sometimes due to their wounding experiences in World War I. Their lives are mostly alcoholic busyness and Hemingway captures their tedious gaiety to perfection. But without the foils of excellence and idealism, these characters and their behavior seem merely dull, boyish, and humorless. Further, they are relentlessly anti-Semitic, which this reader experienced as a brainless reaction to the unrewarding and trivial content of their days and nights. (If something is wrong, blame Robert Cohn.)

Stylistically, TSAR is uneven. Frequently, Hemingway uses a technique of following observations in strict temporal sequence. This works wonderfully when, say, Jake is praying in church and his mind moves, without much control, from one subject to the next. But this technique works less well when Hemingway describes the countryside, which is often. His style is: I saw this. Then I saw that. Next came this. The effect is that the writing doesn't attain focus. Here's one of many examples, this one from Chapter 10:

"We came down out of the mountains and through an oak forest, and there were white cattle grazing in the forest. Down below there were grassy plains and clear streams, and then we crossed a stream and went through a gloomy village, and started to climb again. We climbed up and up and crossed another high Col and turned along it, and the road ran down to the right, and we saw a whole new range of mountains...."

See what I mean? This is just a list, with Hemingway not bothering to pull what Jake sees into a single memorable and evolving image. I know: The professors say this is deliberate, with the imaginative reader knowing how this terse prose fits together visually. But aren't skilled authors supposed to do this work for their readers?

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Bordering on self-parody

It's not a bad book. It is a tale of the "lost generation," the bitter, aimless men who saw the world end in WWI, but survived it. Having seen the end as young men, they seemed to live the remainder of their lives mourning the lost adrenaline rush, and seeking a way to find it again, such as bullfighting, or at least witnessing bullfighting, and glorifying the life "lived all the way up."

But Hemingway's vaunted writing style is almost ridiculous in its "manly" terseness, eschewing most adjectives and adverbs, and reading as if he had a court reporter in his head, transcribing whatever his eyes took in: "We passed through a town and stopped in front of the posada, and the driver took on several packages. Then we started on again, and outside the town the road commenced to mount. We were going through farming country with rocky hills that sloped down into the fields. The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain." (That's in Chapter 11. It goes on, but there is no real purpose to it, so I will spare you.)

Then there's my favorite passage, from Chapter 12: "The girl came in with the coffee and buttered toast. Or, rather, it was bread toasted and buttered." Yeah, Ernie, I wasn't feeling quite comfortable with that damned adjective either. "What does he mean by 'buttered toast?'" I asked myself. But then you told me, in your simple declarative style, just exactly what "buttered toast" meant. Thanks for clearing that up.

I'll give him a break, because it is a hell of a novel for a 26-year-old to write, but I wish he had gotten over the machismo thing in his writing before he died. Since he didn't, I'll still take Steinbeck as my favorite American author.

By the way, if the characters in this book truly drank as much as Hemingway said they did, fictional livers must be made of sterner stuff than real ones.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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