The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
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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: 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: The Sun Also Rises: Book Review
Summary: 5 Stars
Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is a book that everyone should read. In it, Hemingway focuses on the concept of love but in a very unique way. Hemingway uses his characters to portray love as a scary thing. He strongly supports his notions regarding love throughout the book.
The book takes place in Paris and Spain. A group of friends travel to a small Spanish town for a fishing trip and to participate in the annual grand fiesta. The group consists of four men and one women. The women, named Brett, had some interesting ideas towards relationships. She creates conflict between the men and even between some newly found Spanish friends. It appears Brett creates conflict to avoid getting close to people. The drinking is endless, creating even more conflict between friends. Many relationships are ruined in a period of only a few days.
The book is told from the first person perspective of a well off American writer named Jake, who lives and works in Paris. Hemingway uses Jake to tell the story of how some people lived during the early 1900's. I think Hemingway wrote this book to give a good, entertaining look into the lives of Europeans in the early 1900's. I also think something in his own life gave him the idea to write this book. He spent a portion of his life living in Paris; his experiences there could have contributed to the portrayal of events in The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway's style of writing through the dialogue of his characters makes this book suitable for all teens and adults. Hemingway never overstates conversation. There is a purpose in every word he writes, and it sounds like you could actually be talking to the character. Hemingway's idea of love was intriguing in that he describes it as complicated and unforgiving. In the future, this Hemingway presentation of love could change my opinions of other characters in other books.
I would highly recommend this book to others for several reasons. First, I think everyone needs to read Hemingway to experience his unique writing style. It is brilliantly simple. Second, the ideas presented regarding love are intriguing. For example, Hemingway focuses on fear of love and suggests people don't always end up with their true love. Hemingway's portrayal of people's fear of relationships may help explain some reasons for divorce. For example, fi people tend to avoid the most meaningful relationships, the "lesser" relationships may be more likely to end in failure. Third, this book remains contemporary. Everyone who reads this book can find a connection to themselves or a family member. Indeed, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises focuses on the many layered connections of his characters--I think those connections made this book easier and more fun to read.-By Hannah Hunsaker
Book Review: The Lost Generation Found
Summary: 5 Stars
One of Hemingway's earlier works, THE SUN ALSO RISES remains one of his best. This roman à clef has it all -- drinking, misbehaving expats, more drinking, humor, sarcasm, irony, unrequited love, beautiful descriptions of Spain, did I mention drinking?, femme fatales, handsome bullfighters, fishing trips, a tad more drinking, manly-man themes, and outstanding dialogue.
About halfway through the book, a character named Bill Gorton about nails it when he tells the protagonist narrator, Jake Barnes, exactly what an expat is. It's meant to be funny, but in many ways it defines the book's sense of itself: "You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés."
Luckily for us, Hemingway wrote and didn't just talk, but his novel is delightfully "talky" and the reader can't resist but listen in as a beautiful Brit named Brett makes verbal love with our protagonist Jake; or as Jake mercilessly excoriates the "phony" writer Robert Cohn (yes, Virginia, there IS a whiff of anti-Semitism in play here); or as Jake and Bill engage in witty and sometimes drunken badinage as they go on their memorable fishing trip in the Spanish hills. From the cafés of Paris to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, this book is a roaming holiday. And just when things get ugly and everyone is sick to death of each other, there's the memorable scene where Jake swims into the sea as if to cleanse himself of everything -- the drinking, the fighting, the frustrating impotence. The chapter is vintage Hemingway.
While I admire some of Hemingway's later work, I still feel THE SUN ALSO RISES, along with his early short stories (IN OUR TIME, THE NICK ADAMS STORIES), remains one of his strongest works. It is forever youthful both in its excesses and its beauties, yet it ages quite nicely, too. I heartily recommend it either as an introduction to Hemingway or as a reread. It will bear up in either case.
Book Review: Loved It!
Summary: 5 Stars
The Sun Also Rises is a fascinating novel. I can't believe I hadn't read it years earlier. The protagonist, Jake Barnes, is a tragic hero of sorts. He was wounded in WW1 and his injuries rendered him impotent. His injury deeply affected his psyche, and he is insecure about his masculinity as a result. The love of Jake's life is the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley, who cared for him during the war when he was wounded. She is a shallow woman, who cares for Jake, but will not commit to him because sex is very important to her. Instead Lady Brett spends her time with a variety of men. Jake, on the other hand, spends much of his time in Paris with his buddies, each drinking in cafes and wasting their lives.
The activities that Jake and his buddies engaged in were really quite sad. They seemed like they never grew up, but instead their behavior was reflective of their wish to forget the horrors of the war. They wandered rather aimlessly, a highlight being the fiesta and bullfights in Pamplona where the group engages in more drinking, dancing and debauchery.
This book was originally published in 1926, and its strength is definitely the style in which it was written. Hemingway's writing is sharp and insightful, and you feel every detail: the sight, sounds, the place. The characters, although flawed were sympathetic. I loved how he got into the psyche of the characters, helping the reader feel what their life was like, and why they made some of the decisions they did. I thought it was rather ironic that the title, "The Sun Also Rises", which to me symbolizes a new dawn, a new day, really had no significance for Jake and the other characters in this novel. Rather they never moved on with their lives, stuck in time, as a result of the past. Hemingway seemed to truly understand the struggles and challenges that life handed his characters, and for that matter -- each of us. Some individuals are made stronger by adversity, but others are not. In the end though, we rarely get everything we want in life -- do we?
A Brilliant novel - Don't Miss It!