The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Sun Also Rises
Book Review: Bitter sweet
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm Jake. Jacob Barnes. American journalist. Living in Paris. I send off my cables. I work hard for a couple of hours. I put the stories in big manila envelopes. And send them out. That brings in the money.
French? I speak French.
Spanish? I speak Spanish.
Don't think I've got it made. I don't. The War did bad things to me. The War wounded me. Physically. Okay, I survived. Some say the wound was worse than dying.
I have a girlfriend. Brett. Brett Ashley. Lady Ashley. She got "Lady" from a past marriage. Everyone loves Brett. She is a remarkably attractive woman. And she loves that everyone -- all the men -- love her.
I love her, and she loves me. Deeply. That's the end of it. We know that I can't consummate anything. Physically I cannot get it on. That's the War wound. We can kiss, and she shivers. But that's it.
"We kissed standing at the door. She pushed me away. We kissed again. 'Oh, don't!' Brett said."
The wound hurts me and the wound hurts her. So, she sleeps around. With all the guys in our group that she is attracted to. And others not in our group. Like the daring young, very young bullfighter later on. And with others she is not attracted to. Like the ex-champion boxer from Princeton, who is a Jew, sometime author, and magazine publisher. The Jew keeps hanging on. She would like to be rid of him. But he keeps hanging on.
Brett does not have independent income. The boys, the men, who love her take care of her. Drinks. Food. Hotel rooms. Sometimes they go on short trips.
All of us do a lot of drinking. A lot of drinking. We drink in the morning. We drink at lunch. We drink in the afternoon. We drink at dinner. We drink in the evening. We drink during the night. All night. We drink. Good stuff.
We all love hanging out. Going out. To the bars. Inside the bars. Outside the bars. At tables. And drinking. We get drunk. Hung over. Feel bad.
And arguing. Fighting even. Sure, and sometimes we hike. We walk through Paris. The Tuileries. By the Seine. Or out in the towns. In the woods. We play some tennis.
In Paris you can see anyone you want. South Americans. Americans. The English.
A bunch of us decide to hire a car and driver to go to Spain for some fishing in the mountains and for the fiesta at Pamplona. Others go by train.
My friend Bill and I ride a crowded bus to the mountains. We sit with many on top of the bus. The riders pass around leather wine-bottles. Lifted high, the wine streams down to your mouth. Good fun. Laughing. Good camaraderie.
We reach the river. We have worms and fishing flies and catch a lot of trout. We hide wine bottles in the cold river. The bottles get very cold.
Back to Pamplona. The others arrive in time for the fiesta. The fiesta explodes. The street is solid with dancers. The fiesta goes on for seven days and nights.
I go to sleep in my room. I wake to a rocket exploding, announcing the release of the bulls from the edge of town. From my balcony the street is empty. Suddenly the street is filled with people running. And the bulls running on the way to the ring. The bulls toss several runners.
In the ring the bullfights begin. The purest and most exciting fighter is Pedro Romero. Everyone sees the bulls goring the picadors' horses and goring the steers brought into the ring. Romero is nineteen. Brett is in her thirties. She has eyes only for him.
In a restaurant in the evening, our group strikes up a conversation with Romero's table. Introductions all around.
Brett confesses she is a goner for Romero.
Later, more about Brett and Romero. And about Brett and myself. About Paris. And Madrid. But . . . not right now.
Book Review: Book
Summary: 3 Stars
The seller stated the book was like new but there were footnotes written on the some of the pages and the pages were bunny eared (I hate that it ruins a good book) ... Other then that it was as described great price and quick shipping.Book Review: Bordering on self-parody
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Book Review: Boring Read
Summary: 2 Stars
I picked up the Sun Also Rises as my first introduction to Hemingway. While I was very excited - I have to say however that I was fairly disappointed with this 200+ page novel. More than once during this novel, I had thoughts of putting it down never to return to it.
The pace of the book, extremely slow and methodical, make it very difficult to get through the whole story. The tone is fairly monotonous for most of the book with the plot unwinding in very ordinary fashion without much intrigue whatsoever.
I found the characters in the book to be a bit annoying - their excessive eating and drinking along with their rather quick, undeveloped dialogue proved difficult to digest. The characters appeared to avoid some of the major topics, situations and events that were laid out in the novel in favor of drinking, eating & socializing.
The saving grace of this book is Hemingway's depiction of bull-fighting towards the end. Even though many pages are not spent in this area, there was well-written, intriguing and even suspenseful prose in those bull-fighting pages.
The main reason I read this book through till the end was to find out how things would develop and end with the character Brett - and her relationship with Jake.
As I mentioned - however - the novel proved to be a disappointment.
Book Review: Brilliant man that Ernest, brilliant man...
Summary: 5 Stars
Look at this passage:
"We walked on and circled the island. The river was dark and a bateau mouche went by, all bright with lights, going fast and quiet up and out of sight under the bridge. Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky. We crossed to the left bank of Seine by the wooden foot-bridge from the Quai de Bethune, and stopped on the bridge and looked down the river at Notre Dame. Standing on the bridge the island looked dark, the houses were high against the sky, and the trees were shadows.
"It's pretty grand," Bill said. "God, I love to get back."
This sound like a music to my ears. Bravo Ernest, you're a genius.