The Sun Also Rises (Pb)

Jake, the narrator, is impotent and in love with Brett Ashley, who is a—what was a female f***boy called in the 1920s? There is Robert Cohn, who wants Brett Ashley, Mike, who wants Brett Ashley, and Bill, who sort of just hangs around. Jake and Bill go to Pamplona, Spain to do some fishing and later reunite with Robert, Brett and Mike for the fiesta. This is the point where the book takes a sharp turn and transforms into a Spanish travelogue, with vivid details of the landscape and scenery, and that is the best part of the book. The plot? Doesn't really go anywhere. This is supposed to be a book about Americans, but it's really just about the elite living on old money in Europe, trying to make it big, but all they do is drink and complain about everything. Anyway, they meet Romero, a handsome Spanish bullfighter. Oh, and he wants Brett Ashley. Brett is engaged to Mike, but has a week-long affair with Cohn, and then an affair with Romero. Brett likes Jake but they can't be together. And that's it, that's the book. While I appreciate the descriptive writing and the dialogue, I wanted more. It seemed like a filler for a larger, better story. There was hardly any character development, and I couldn't feel an affinity for any of the characters apart from Jake. What I did feel, however, was a painful longing to visit Spain. That warrants a star. 2.5/5

The text size is very small.Difficult to read.The book (page ) size is also very small.The letter size is small (font size 9). Difficult to read.Page quality is also average.

Classic

the lead characters and the settings donot look unfamiliar but the delineation is as delightfully woven as ever; the irresistible urge to explore the contours of an impossible love and the constantly shifting scenes impart an unusual flavour.

Shows relationships in Europe with a backdrop of vacation at Spain, the pursuit of women, friends hanging out...Simple and well dramatised with reality...

One star less because I dont like the way the story is going. Not my cup of tea!But the product is in finne condition.

One of the greatest story teller.

If you have never read anything by Papa Hemingway before, read this. Just This......

There is no point to reading Hemingway, particularly The Sun Also Rises, if you are looking merely for entertainment. The entire book is a denouncement of people who seek only entertainment and purposefully tries to exclude you from enjoying the book. Just don't read it if you read only for entertainment - you're already part of the Lost Generation, if that's what you're doing because, while you can deny it, that's you he is trying to capture in those dissolute spectators of the bullfight. They don't fight, they drink. In your case, reading is the same as drinking - a way to escape and be entertained. Hemingway and the proprietor of the bullfighter's hotel don't want you there. Go home. You're ruining it, he says.Hemingway saw that people were not, as he had been taught as a child, becoming more and more capable of enjoying and producing peace and beauty. This was only true if you kept your head in the sand and tried to live in the suburbs. Hemingway's father had not yet shot himself, but his wife's father had - and he knew that, even in Midwestern America, the truth of life's very harsh realities could creep in. He adores the Spanish for maintaining a culture that permits the age old practice of tauromachia, bullfighting. It keeps people's heads on straight. It does not allow them to be ostriches. It is only natural that young Americans, raised to believe that the world is mostly entertainment and mostly constructed for their own enjoyment, would be drawn to a grittier cultural event - even if only briefly. The truly alive, though, become aficionados (in the Spanish sense) of the fights. They open their eyes to everything, particularly the specter of their own death.Is it possible to enjoy contemplating death? One's own death? If you don't think it's possible, then this book is probably not for you. It is nothing like a horror story, it is not fake death made momentarily into an adrenalin rush, from which you can hide your face (you can hide your face while at the bullfights; you cannot hide from death itself).Hemingway was born in 1899, just 4 years after certain historians had proclaimed the Closing of the American West (meaning: subduing of the last of the hunter-gatherer tribes and the complete expansion of "traditional American values" into the entire North American continent. He was raised with notions similar to what parents seem to want for their kids today, ideas about family life going well, everyone being happy, no drinking problems, no one acting out sexually, everyone gender-normal, and so on. Yet, he knew it wasn't so. He knew that humans are humans and there was nothing new under the sun.Only men were sent into combat, young men with ideals in the case of World War I. Hemingway wants to capture the "Riau Riau" mindset that allows men, in a trancelike state, to rise up out of the trenches and charge forward while either being blown to bits or having other people's bits end up on your body (as happened to him). We are not going to live forever, are we? So why die as cowards? Die as a hero!We don't push the heroism meme as much as it was pushed prior to World War I or World War II. We sort of gave up on that - perhaps in the 60's. Hemingway was part of the extinction of this kind of hero. Oh, people still invent games for themselves in which they travel, play sports, climb mountains, run marathons and so on, to still be "heroes" but without killing anything. We don't want heroism associated with killing or dying for a cause and yet, in all of human history, there it is still. People in Kiev (right or wrong) deciding to advance against the police and getting themselves shot - with others watching. People finding that even a shot to the leg isn't a good thing, and doesn't feel as heroic as it felt just a few minutes earlier, while preparing to advance on the enemy. People love having enemies, but the fact that for most 21st century American (and other Anglophone) readers, the "enemies" are now either things like evil corporations or the other people's rugby team, makes the world rather different.In Hemingway's time, a huge war had just been fought, with people (much like oneself, by the way) as the real and true enemy. Germans had been part of the European community, just across the border from France, and now they were the enemy. Russia, once an ally, got itself a separate peace (and saved a bunch of Russians from being killed). Real people were killing real people with greater efficiency than ever before. But why?Because people, men in particular, are designed this way. They get into groups, worked up into various frenzies, and stuff happens. Cultures that can channel the "stuff" into the bullring, well, perhaps that's a partial solution. Perhaps not (Hemingway will consider that in For Whom the Bell Tolls). Perhaps the bullring is merely a way of keeping people perpetually ready to rise up in violence and die for a cause. Maybe that's what all sports do (the ones that are true sports, Hemingway might say - he hated tennis).If you are reading this book cold, you will probably have the reactions of many others (see the 3 star and lower reviews). I strongly suggest you read two volumes of Michael Reynolds's biography of Hemingway (the first two: Young Hemingway and the Paris Years). Read Paul Fussell's The Great War in Modern Memory before reading The Sun Also Rises. Don't just watch war movies, you will turn yourself into the very kind of reader that Hemingway is scathingly trying to insult.Remember, Hemingway was trying to needle and agitate people who may be just like you or me, people who sit at home reading and have not been in the trenches, people who don't go to bullfights. How would he feel about modern audiences, with all the vegans and vegetarians and animal rights people within them? I think he would say that while the ambition is noble, that the understanding of the killing is more important than ever. If you are going to save animals (including people), you must understand human nature and human history. Human nature, on the ground, in all its somewhat eccentric and boring detail, must be at least noticed, and if possible, understood. Even changed.When I first read The Sun, I deplored what I thought was the glorification of bullfighting and the cult of machismo. I was quite young and did not know much about the world then. I thought I would never read it again. When I read it the second time, I knew a lot more about Hemingway and I had read some of the 5 star reviews here. I realized I'd missed the whole point (and it isn't just about the symbolism - I got that part). Now, reading it again, slowly, a third time (because I am interested in understanding the craft of writing - so much is known about Hemingway's processes, reading it again with that information in mind is quite a new read), I realize that the intense literary criticism brought to bear on Hemingway, as well as his public persona, make this book completely amazing. It is a touchstone for not just one generation, but for almost a century's worth of modern readers. It changed how movies were made, it changed how people talked about reality.Because once upon a time, people simply ignored the "black sheep" in every family, until they were piled up so high that someone had to notice that there were more black sheep than white sheep. The entire symbology of this black sheep/white sheep business had to be thrown over. Well brought up and well-to-do people were behaving outside of the standards of puritanical Christendom. Oh no. What to do? What to say? There were gay people! And women who liked sex! And people who had affairs! And prostitutes! And alcohol! (Even during prohibition!!!) Did the puritanical beliefs fail to take hold because the people were flawed? Or were the beliefs flawed? Or had anyone ever really believed them?I think Hemingway leads us down many trails in answering these questions. He keeps his own cards close to his chest (he loved pictures of poker players and throwing dice; he spent money he didn't have on a painting of dice throwing by Masson). He knows that his parents seem to be "true believers" in the middle class, Midwestern ethos (he knows they will disapprove of the characters in the book, as so many readers here still do). He doesn't know, yet, that his father will shoot himself (and that two of his siblings will also be suicides). But he knows there's something amiss with the whole thing and in the end, prefers to slip back in time, and to another culture, to the corridas and the ancient dance with the bull. He knows that near Pamplona, some of the earliest art in the world depicts a human conception of a bull as powerful - but also the entire point of the Hunt. Even Hemingway, though, cannot make the actual bullfighter the protagonist of the novel, even if he intended him to be the Hero. Hemingway is too modern, himself, too much of a spectator to be a bullfighter - or, as he seems to say in The Sun, even a true aficionado.Without true love for something, we are lost. The entire generation was lost, it had lost the possibility of true love. He thought he loved Hadley, during the period depicted in The Sun and in the period when he was writing it, he became painfully aware that he no longer loved Hadley in the same way - he had another "true love." He did not want to admit, ever, that he had lost the capability of loving truly, which is why he tried to capture the minutiae of how love is born and how it dies. By becoming expert on this subject of love (Lady Brett is certainly loved in many different ways, all of them "true"), Hemingway hopes not to be lost.Many of his other themes are lost on today's readers, though, because we have all but given up on the notions of masculinity and femininity that Hemingway was steeped in (as was the next generation after him, and the one after that - the ones who fought in World War II; they still had those same notions); we have given up on the touchstone of extreme competition as an inherent value (we give ribbons and trophies to all the kids who "compete" in our suburban children's leagues). Showing people drunk or otherwise intoxicated is a commonplace (Jersey Shores, anyone?) and no one is shocked - in fact, they are apparently amused and entertained. Perhaps that's why that aspect of the book seems relatively boring.Finally, Hemingway doesn't want you to spectate. He purposefully took out interior monologues, bits about what people were thinking, many of the "explanations" of the action. He had this perverse idea that you, the reader, are supposed to be actively engaged - using your imagination. He was showing you exactly what happened. What did it mean? You are supposed to stop and think about it, imagine it. This book is a great one to read aloud with a significant other or older kids. We don't know a single family, anywhere, who doesn't have some of these people in them. In our neighborhood, there are drug addicts, 12 steppers, homeless people who apparently have wandered away from any sort of family - all kinds of "lost" people. Is your world really that different? If so, it will be changing soon. There is no where on the planet where a thinking person can live and not encounter the problems of death, destruction, unrequited loves and all that Hemingway scrupulously describes.But it is a literary description, not a self-help book. He provides no answers and he didn't intend to be uplifting.

My eighth-grade literature teacher was a Hemingway fan. But she faced a problem. She’d already gotten into trouble for assigning “The Lord of the Flies” and “The Day of the Triffids” to our all-boys class. And she loved Hemingway, but she knew he might be problematic. Her solution was to have us read “The Old Man and the Sea,” which had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and whose author had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. How could the principal and parents argue with that?The author’s name you did not mention in her presence was F. Scott Fitzgerald.My American literature teacher during my junior year in high school was squarely in Fitzgerald’s camp. Hemingway was not a writer, she sniffed; at best you might consider him a journalist. She was eloquent in her praise of “The Great Gatsby,” but “The Old Man and the Sea” proved you couldn’t trust the judgment of the Pulitzer Prize jurors. And Hemingway wrote about all kinds of unseemly, unmentionable things. She didn’t say anything about Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, which, one might argue, has an unseemly, unmentionable thing at its heart.I had never read Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” which has at its core an unseemly, unmentionable thing, at least in the 1920s – a man’s impotence due to a war injury. The man is Jake Barnes, who works as a journalist (much like Hemingway did) in Paris. He speaks French and Spanish, in addition to his native American English, and he does what Americans of the Lost Generation do in Paris of the 1920s – visit night clubs and drink a lot. Barnes is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, an Englishwoman in the process of divorce and re-marriage, who also has a string of affairs. Because everyone loves Brett Ashley, everyone forgives her affairs. Even her fiancé.We suspect, but can’t prove, that Lady Ashley’s affairs have everything to do with the fact that she loves Barnes, but it is a love that can never be consummated. Everyone else becomes a substitute.Barnes and his circle travel to Spain for the annual running of the bulls and the bullfights. Barnes himself and his friend Bill also go for the trout fishing (Hemingway liked fishing stories). And it is there, in Spain, that the story reaches its crisis, although Hemingway’s famous writing style almost disguises the fact that the story is building toward a crisis. The bullfights are a metaphor, a plot development device, and a symbol for what the story is about. Barnes’ impotence, though barely mentioned, is also a symbol of a man who can’t fully live life and is consigned to living it vicariously through others (I’m not sure if it’s a commentary on journalism or not).“The Sun Also Rises” is almost a century old (first published in 1926), but it reads almost like a contemporary novel. Hemingway wrote sparingly; he didn’t like many adjectives or adverbs. He also wrote almost stepwise and very matter-of-factly, not unlike the way journalists used to write (“He picked up his glass; he drank from his glass; he put the glass down.”).It’s significant that, with the exception of Brett Ashley, all of the characters are male, and even Ashley has a male name. This masculine focus has made Hemingway something of a persona non grata in many academic and literary circles today. I was also somewhat surprised at the rather open anti-Semitism that focuses on one character.“The Sun Also Rises” builds slowly. You don’t realize the grip the story has on you until deep into the narrative. The people are indeed card-carrying members of the Lost Generation. They can’t have what they desire most, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to obtain it.

I can't really pin down what it is that made me like this book. There is no driving plot to keep you turning the pages. Nothing much happens, it's all a bit vague. But there's something compelling about the feeling of being amongst a group of interesting people doing nothing very interesting apart from going to the odd bull fight and drinking vast quantities of wine and eating lots of fine food.I like his laconic style of writing, and I will read another Hemingway. But not The Old man and the sea, which I found boring.

For someone who is a massive non-fiction reader, that is still learning to read fiction, this book is an acquired taste for me. Brilliant at the beginning, can be somewhat dull in the middle, and at a first glance it just abruptly ended without any real conclusion.But still, this is Hemingway’s famed first novel. The best he ever wrote, according to his biographer Jeffrey Myers.It is a story inspired by an actual event, during the post World War 1 era that produced the so-called “lost generation” of American expatriates that stayed on in Europe and lived in a hedonic manner. In particular, the book is inspired by the events and people from the summer of 1925 when Hemingway and several expats lived in Paris and went to Pamplona for the Festival of San Fermín.It is also a soap opera of love entanglement between several people in the group, with Lady Brett Ashley at the center of it. The drama is neatly summarised by Hemingway’s grandson, Seán, in the book’s introduction: “Sometimes love just happens, and it does not always end happily. Brett’s affairs with Jake, Cohn, Mike Campbell, and even Pedro Romero are hopelessly entwined and tragically sad. Love triumphs over all but leaves carnage in its wake. For Jake Barnes, wisdom is gained at the expense of heartbreak.”Indeed, Brett is a character that you either love or hate. And the fact that people’s opinion of her have been polarized for decades is a testament to Hemingway who created her complex character.Moreover, in the same introduction Seán also writes about his grandfather’s process of writing, editing, and rewriting of this book, which gives the needed context of what’s going on inside Hemingway’s mind as he wrote it. This comes in handy later on, as my focus on the novel shifted to the style of writing and not the story itself (which can be quite over the top and exaggerated at times).This is where the book becomes a masterpiece, where Hemingway shows his talent on describing a complex set of personalities, which then mashed them up together in a single narrative. It has a smooth buildup of the introduction of each of the characters from zero to complicated human beings, with the flawed relationships between the individuals become more apparent as the story develops. It is also very impressive how Hemingway can vividly describe the atmosphere of the places as the background context in which the character interactions take place.All in all, the novel feels like quite a long story filled with so many events, adventures, and tragedies, considering the book is only 98 pages long. And as always, the thing is with Hemingway’s books is that they make you think of all other analogies in a similar situation as his stories. And this is what eventually blew my mind at the after thought.A case in point, the title “The Sun Also Rises” refers to a biblical verse Ecclesiastes 1:5 where King Solomon (the wisest man ever lived) said “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.” Which loosely translated to human condition is a never ending cycle of ups and downs, happy and sad, triumphs and defeats. And by acknowledging this cycle it can lessen some of the pains during all the chaos, such as the despairs occurring in the story, as whatever happens today the sun will rise again tomorrow.This, makes the otherwise dull and uneventful ending (that conversation inside the taxi) becomes a deep philosophical essence of the entire book. And this, is what makes Hemingway one of the best there is.

I finished this novel for the second time last night and felt compelled to write my first Hemingway review. I’ve been reading Hemingway for over 20 years, starting with For Whom The Bell Tolls in the mid-nineties, followed by the Old Man and the Sea on a trip to Cuba in 2001, where I visited the hotel that Hemingway stayed at before he bought his own place, and the two famous bars where he spent his days, the Floridita and the Bodegita del Medio. I’ve also read A Farewell to Arms and the complete short stories.Enough of that. The problem with Hemingway is he began his writing career in the 1920s when anti-Semitism and the use of the N word were acceptable, if not respectable. To be fair to Hemingway, in this novel the N word is only used when a character recounts a sympathetic anecdote about an African American boxer in dire straits in Vienna. However, the anti-Semitism is rife among several characters, and although the narrator is friends with Robert Cohn, the Jew in the novel, and is not overtly anti-Semitic himself, he doesn’t challenge the anti-Semitism of the other characters, which is a way of implying that it’s “OK”.This problem isn’t unique to Hemingway, and if we burned all the books that contain offensive references to women, Jews, gay people, Black people, an Amazon warehouseful of literature would go up in smoke. Yes, there are bits of this novel that make me wince, but I’ve found that’s the case with a great many books from this era, particularly American books. I read The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon a couple of years ago, after seeing both films a dozen times, and the novels both came out as surprisingly homophobic. Only after reading the novels did I detect traces of homophobia in the films (it had all gone over my head previously).The novel is about a group of American, English and Scottish ex-pats living in Paris in the 1920s. They are the “lost generation” who survived the Great War and are trying to rebuild their lives in exile with copious amounts of alcohol. It’s summer and they all decide to go down to Pamplona, Spain, for the fiesta. The narrator Jake Barnes and his mate Bill go first. They’re mad on fishing and bullfighting, so they go down to Spain and fish for trout for a few days and organise tickets for the bullfights that form the main attraction of the fiesta. The others come down later: the aristocratic Englishwoman, Lady Brett Ashley, and her Scottish fiancé, Mike Campbell, and the misfit, Robert Cohn, who has ditched his partner because he’s fallen for Brett. The fiesta presents opportunities for more drinking even than Paris, followed by conflict and violence as the group disintegrates.For me, there are two things that save Hemingway from the pyre: first, that over time his politics improved and he was on the right side of history in the Spanish Civil War and the Cuban Revolution. The second is the quality of his writing. All the stuff about hunting, fishing and bullfighting might seem overly macho and distasteful today, but it’s the way Hemingway writes about these things. His style seems so simple and direct – sometimes “manly” in the worst sense of the word – but underneath there is pounding emotion. This passage refers to a bull goring a bystander as it’s taken to the bullring. Later, a matador kills it in the ring and presents its ear to the novel’s heroine, Brett Ashley, who slept with him the previous night and the night after the bullfight:“The bull who killed Vicente Girones was named Bocanegra, was Number 118 of the bull-breeding establishment of Sanchez Taberno, and was killed by Pedro Romero as the third bull of that same afternoon. His ear was cut by popular acclamation and given to Pedro Romero, who, in turn, gave it to Brett, who wrapped it in a handkerchief belonging to myself, and left both ear and handkerchief, along with a number of Muratti cigarette-stubs, shoved far back in the drawer of the bed-table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya, in Pamplona.”One of the most remarkable things about this novel is that we have an impotent male narrator (result of a war wound) and a heroine who sleeps with three different men in the novel (one is her fiancé, the other two aren’t). Sexual power transferred from male to female. Difficult to explain for a writer who’s often dismissed as a misogynist. There’s no condemnation of Brett and you’re left with the feeling that she’s going to go on doing what she enjoys, whereas in too many novels by men women who like sex come to a bad end.Here’s another example where the narrator and his companions are watching a dance at a fiesta:“In front of us on a clear part of the street a company of boys were dancing. The steps were very intricate and their faces were intent and concentrated. They all looked down while they danced. Their rope-soled shoes tapped and spatted on the pavement. The toes touched. The balls of the feet touched. Then the music broke wildly and the step was finished and they were all dancing up the street.”The artistry here is in what’s not said. We don’t have a detailed description of what they were wearing or the moves of the dance. Hemingway focuses on their faces and feet, and even with my limited imagination I can see those dancers in front of me now.So, despite my misgivings about the N word and the anti-Semitism, I’m giving this book five stars. If you think you’ll be offended, don’t buy it; but if you want to see what made Hemingway such a brilliant story teller, take a punt.