Total Page : 108
Publisher : Barron s Educational Series
Publication Date : 1984 12 01
>> Great oldie
Read this book many years ago and still love it Someone once told me I reminded them of Brett of course ran out immediately bought to read I think I was 19 but just loved about time to read again
>> Other people have done this better
Simply put The Sun Also Rises is the story of a handful Parisian based expat men who go on a trip to Spain to fish and enjoy the running of the bulls The tension in the novel such as it is comes from their all being in love with the same soon to be divorced Englishwoman The novel s most famous part is its anthropology of bullfighting If the characters change at all over the course of the novel it s vanishingly subtle Except of course they re all much closer to the day that a doctor diagnoses them with cirrhosis of the liver
Yeah yeah I know we re also supposed to genuflect before the icon of the great revolutionary of style but in truth Hemingway leaves me cold The way everyone talks about how economical his writing was makes him sound less like a writer and more like a home front housewife who cleverly figured out how to stretch her family s ration coupons further Take for instance this passage
>There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street We were sitting apart and we jolted close together going down the old street Brett s hat was off Her head was back I saw her face in the lights from the open shops then it was dark then I saw her face clearly as we came out on the Avenue des Gobelins The street was town up and men were working on the cartracks by the light of acetylene flares Brett s face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares The street was dark again and I kissed her Our lips were tight together and then she turned away and pressed against the corner of the seat as far away as she could get Her head was down
Say this out loud and it just sounds silly you have the clumsy instances in which back to back sentences end with the same word street and then flares plus the repetition of four word sentences actually sounds wordy because you the reader have to stop and supply the missing connections This writing might have played a key role in the evolution of fiction but it can t on its own be said to be good writing or even decent writing And the clipping of words gets to be down right irritating in three way conversations when you re not told who is speaking and the dialogue is so vague that it s not obviously in the style of one person
There are a few moments when the novel s characters act like human beings Hemingway s style can sometimes lend itself to capturing the essence of drunken conversation and since everyone is always tight in this novel in every scene you re always told what they re drinking he gets a lot of chances to get it right Two in particular stand out One is in which a guy gets silly as his Blood Alcohol Level increases and makes an argument that ends with Road to hell paved with unstuffed dogs In context this makes sense and for a moment the character seems like a warm and funny person The other place is when the tension over the woman boils over and one drunk launches a relentless verbal attack on another mandespite everyone telling him to shut up When that happened I glanced up to the top of the page and thought Page 146 and something is finally happening
But what really sinks The Sun Also Rises are the comparisons it begs The novel fits into two saturated genres that have been done much better Two vastly superior expats of Paris novels are George Orwell s Down and Out in London and Paris and Geoff Dyer s more recent Paris Trance and there s a lot in between As a novel of the Great War generation F Scott Fitzgerald s The Beautiful and Damned just dances circles around it like Fred Astaire sensually gliding around a dumb fire hydrant Ironically Fitzgerald who helped in the editing of The Sun Also Rises would go on to die in obscurity while this novel began Hemingway s march to the Nobel Prize Such is justice in the literary world
>> Pointless Rambling
I just finished reading The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and can t imagine why he s so popular The story was aimless meandering pointless and plotless and the characters were pitiful I wouldn t normally have chosen to read it but it was the selection of the month for my book discussion group
The main character Jake told the story in the first person but gave away very little information about himself He and his loser friends wandered around Europe staying in various degrees of intoxication throughout the book He seemed to be having a platonic love affair with the main female character Brett who came to him with her problems and disappointments declared her hopeless love for him and then went off to sleep with one of his drunken friends
Nothing ever really happened in the book no mission to accomplish no barrier to overcome no antagonist to beat Hemingway spent very little effort describing his characters and far too much effort reporting on the scenery There was alot of dialogue but inane redundant and mostly meaningless I don t know what Heminway s personal views on ethnic and racial diversity were but this book was definintely not politically correct
The only real action if you can call it that was a very boring description of an uneventful fishing trip to Spain and then a fiesta and the accompanying fireworks and bullfights At this point Hemingway broke all the literary rules of perspective and switched from first person point of view to omniscient and proceeded to go into detailed descriptions of the bull fighters and their thoughts and motivations It was the most enthusiasm he d shown throughout the entire book
None of the characters knew what they really wanted and let life drift by them in a drunken fog If this book has any message at all then it must be that life is meaningless without a goal to reach or a cause to believe in
