The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Sun Also Rises
Book Review: A drinking binge
Summary: 3 Stars
Written in first person, a journalist for an American newspaper meets up with friends and acquaintances in Paris France. The characters are unlikable: spoiled and self-centered. They begin their escapades frequenting restaurants and cafes overindulging in alcohol. Three of the men are infatuated with one of the women (a tramp) in the circle. The party (both definitions) then moves on to Spain, continuing to live-it-up: they go on a fishing trip, take part in the Fiesta and go to the bullfights. They end up meeting back in France to say their good-byes.
The novel is typical Hemmingway: the themes are familiar, it is full of dialogue, and reads like a report----banal. I think it lacks depth and is overrated. In wonderment, I still find myself reading his work. What I enjoy is his ability to go against the rules of writing. And how much of his stories are his experiences?
Wish you well
Scott
Book Review: A portrait of a lost generation
Summary: 5 Stars
"Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn..."
With these words - which immediately give us a narrator with attitude - Ernest Hemingway begins his first big novel, published in 1926. This novel perfectly evokes the twenties. It is a portrait of a group of British and American expatriates enjoying the café scene of Left Bank Paris, who decide to take an excursion to Pamplona in Spain to see bullfighting.
What could be more charming or interesting than to see (or hear in Hemingway's inimitable dialogues) these well-educated bright young things? And yet the ravages of the Great War lurk underneath the surface, with ruined bodies, ruined minds, cynicism and spiritual dissolution.
It is helpful to remember that when people talk about the "Lost Generation", they mean the survivors of a horrible and wasteful war. This war killed so many young men (the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 cost England 23,000 young men), that plenty of women had to live out their lives without any hope of marriage and family.
It is not surprising that the twenties - when people tried to cope with the aftermath of so much destruction - evokes so many images of light and darkness. This book is particularly relevant today.
Book Review: A story about immoral alcoholics
Summary: 2 Stars
My main beef with this book was that no one was likable AT ALL. They were all a bunch of morally-bankrupt, selfish and snobby rich Americans who trot all over Europe satisfying their whims and drinking themselves into oblivion, all while imposing their disgusting lives on other people.(Autobiographical?) If you took out every reference to how drunk these people got, this would be a 50-page novella. You might say, "That's what Hemingway was trying to portray". OK, in that sense this was a powerful book because the characters' pathetic lives were so vividly impressed upon my mind. Perhaps. However, I could never recommend this novel for the very subject matter and tone of the novel. Hemingway's writing is, simply put, bizarre. He translates Spanish syntax anad phrasing into English, which results in awkward-sounding phrases and his descriptive abilities are marginal. I would pass on this one.Book Review: A very dark sun
Summary: 5 Stars
The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, is Hemingway's great first novel about the aftermath of World War I on a group of Americans living in Paris in the 1920's. It's view of life is bleak to the very end, almost to a fault; but it has a kind of sparse poetic grace in descriptive language that carries one through the pessimism on a wave of aesthetic bliss.
The greatness is a product of this original narrative style executed to nearly perfect emotional and tonal effect. It is a new kind of stream of consciousness: not flashy, jazzy and allusive like Joyce, Woolf, or (three years later) Faulkner; but instead a steady chain of observations from the inner thoughts of someone who is sane, experienced, and who looks to report reality with a kind of shell-shocked, bunker objectivity; and whose emotions come through in the cynical realism one might expect from a survivor of an apocalypse. At times the spare descriptions created insufficient clarity, so that some sentences cannot be definitively intepreted and so the meaning is lost or diminished, but such sentences are rare.
The emotion underneath the cynicism is subtle, and its impact is cumulative. It develops as one comes to trust Hemingway as a truth-teller. The narrator and main character tells a story of aimless and pleasure-less indulgence, in which war trauma (physical and psychological) is the felt but unspoken source and context of all the emptiness in the characters' actions.
Jake Barnes is the owner of the consciousness being so artfully described. But Brett Ashley, the woman he loves and can't get away from, is the vortex of all the emotional action. She is a woman who loves Jake and is not deceptive to him, yet because he can't satisfy her she uses several other men for sex. She seems to have some vague variety of intermittent idealism and moral pride, so she occasionally struggles to manage the side-effects of her cold impulsiveness.
Brett is a remarkable character in that clearly she is damaged like Jake (psychically if not physically), and yet she has a unique power that none of the men do, and in watching how she uses that power, one cannot decide to the very end of the story if she is more or less of a person than Jake, or if she has courage, or is worth much sympathy, or if her conscience is fully developed, or if she even has a conscience. That is, one wonders if her apparent moral pride and idealism are actually just grief for having lost any moral pride and idealism.
Her deep, enigmatic complexity (and how it makes the reader react) is the greatest accomplishment in this story, but given her place as the emotional center of the story, the emptiness surrounding this elusive complexity also makes perhaps the most cynical statement in a book filled with such cynicism, about the powerlessness that emotionally damaged humans have over their own will. The book has a great last line which sums up all of this tough-minded despair.
It may be a matter of opinion as to whether 'The Sun Also Rises' is a classic tragedy or just a well-executed exercise in morbid masochism. In any case, it is unforgettable.
Book Review: After the party
Summary: 5 Stars
Ernest Hemingway's classic novel explores the dissipated lives of expatriates in Europe in the years following WWI, most notably the ill-fated pair of Jake Barnes, who suffers from an emasculating war wound, and Lady Brett Ashley, the beautiful woman who entrances every man she meets but shares emotional intimacy only with Jake.
We are treated to the café lifestyle of the Lost Generation in Paris, followed by a trip to Pamplona to witness the running of the bulls, all of it liberally lubricated by alcohol. But despite the nearly non-stop pleasure-seeking, there is very little joy for the characters in this book. It all has the feel of a party that has gone on too long; the party-goers become irritated with each other because they should have all gone back to their "real" lives long ago. Unfortunately, they are not sure what their real lives should consist of, so they grasp at temporary relationships that always end badly, leaving them ever more jaded and unsatisfied. This is dramatized powerfully by the cloud of men buzzing around the lovely and charming Brett, who abandons each in turn when the threat of physical and emotional intimacy becomes too great. It is Jake's inability to perform the physical act of love that enables their extended emotional connection, making him the person she turns to after each failed affair. I suspect that if Jake were not wounded as he is, she would flee from him as well, and the final paragraphs of the novel make it clear that Jake thinks so, too.
If there are few pleasures for the characters, there are many for the reader. In addition to Hemingway's masterful depiction of character, the novel works as a travelogue, particularly in his wonderful evocation of Spain. This novel is rightly considered to be a classic.