The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ernest HemingwayEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-17
ISBN: 0743297334
Number of pages: 251
Publisher: Scribner
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780743297332
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
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Book Reviews of The Sun Also Rises
Book Review: This is how Great Novelists Debut
Summary: 5 Stars
What am I going to read next to top this?
That may be your first thought as you silently absorb the last lines of this superlative novel. It sure was mine. As with "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" this is one of the greatest debuts of any novelist and a modernist masterpiece. However, unlike "Portrait" this is not a bildungsroman. The closest Hemingway ever had to a Stephen Daedalus is Nick Adams and he is forever relegated to the short stories. From this novel going forward all the main characters are going to be the adult Hemingway and his experiences, albeit with a tagged on name.
Twain, whom Hemingway regarded as the greatest American novelist, is a clear influence on the breezy travelogue prose here. I'm reminded of of the kinetic stagecoach experiences of "Roughing It." If Twain sounds old remember that Hemingway was much closer in time to Twain than we are to Hemingway. Twain died just 16 years before the publication of "The Sun Also Rises" when Hemingway was 27 years old. However, I sense impressionism was also an influence in the simple broad brush he paints with when describing landscapes. In fact, I know it was via his autobiographical "A Moveable Feast." This is what informs his Zen style. A river, some trees, a patch of strawberries growing on the side of the mountain...you're in an impressionist landscape once they hit the Spanish countryside.
It is in this effortless prose that you go cruising right along into the Paris of the twenties, fishing in Basque country, and fiesta in Pamplona. Be prepared also to drink, drink, drink. It's Prohibition but we're not in protestant America, we're in the greatest city of a continent that has been drinking for thousands of years.
Twain influence notwithstanding, this no freewheeling jaunt of quaint misadventures sprinkled with Southwestern humor. We're in the post-WWI, post-Spanish influenza (which killed vastly more souls than the war) years of modernism and that means godless ennui, absinthe, and the Lost Generation: arty expats saturated with drink and (self-inflicted) heartache in Paris.
Some reader commented "I don't get it." You're not supposed to "get it." If you want to "get it" go read a Tom Clancy novel. This is about poignant irony - a high class flapper slut and a castrated vet in love with each other but forever apart. This is about wanting what you cannot have and dealing with it in one of two ways: the WASP-y approach of repression and stoicism (Jake), or the emotional way by drinking yourself stupid (Mike) or imploding and hurling yourself at others (Cohn). This is a bitter Je ne sais quoi ode to the unconsummated longings of expatriate Americans and Brits in 1920's Paris and it's not meant to be understood, simply experienced. Happy endings are impossible here.
But the characters' sexcapades and drinking are only the story - the rest is the poetry of Hemingway: the river, the Basques on the bus, the festival of San Fermin and of course the bullfights. Because Hemingway is so associated with the bullfights you expect the running of the bulls to be a long descriptive event in the novel and it's a nice surprise when it is not. Jake, the narrator, is hungover and wakes up late and watches it from the balcony of his hotel then goes back to bed. When they run again he sleeps through it. Whatever your preconceptions are about Hemingway it won't matter - everything in this book reads fresh and new and the prose is effortless and flows like the wine in the bota bags.
The closest Hemingway ever came to an artistic manifesto can be found not in his "iceberg analogy" interview with the Paris Review, but in the following quote from him:
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
"The Sun Also Rises" is a classic example of the above. It strikes a wonderful balance between the drama of the characters and their settings. Their desires play out to a backdrop of clinking champagne glasses in Paris, they're given a brief reprieve in the fishing interlude, then take off on a rocket sled during the pagan revelry of the fiesta which assumes a lurid dimension when things all start to go the hell.
If you read this book mentally pack your bags because you're going on vacation from Paris to Spain with five friends. This will forever be in my top ten list of favorite novels.
Summary of The Sun Also Rises
The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.
Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.
But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin
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