The Sun Also Rises

(June 2009 College Students group read)

I have a difficult time enjoying books where I feel no real connection or empathy for any of the characters. I appreciated The Sun Also Rises for its literary and historical importance. But I didn't particularly enjoy the characters or the plot. (Perhaps that was the point.) I would recommend it, though, certainly.

It's been so long since I've rated something two stars. This was so boring and was a real task to get through. I get that this book probably has a ton of layers. It's probably rewarding to re-read this closely and understand all the complex meanings behind every sentence. But I will never voluntarily read this again, because it was just - so - boring.

This was my first Hemingway (and his first novel), and there might be others of his works that suit me better. I know he won a Pulitzer and a Nobel prize, so maybe I should try some other books, but I wasn't enamored by The Sun Also Rises. I understood why Rory Gilmore calls him “the painful Ernest Hemingway” in an episode of Gilmore Girls. The writing is sparse and the plot is twisted and absurd. I did like it more as it went on, and I'm sure it is a good book for parsing for themes in a literature class, but it wasn't a book for me in casual reading.

Mon premier contact avec Hemingway est difficile. Je n'ai pas aimé ce roman, son premier. Je n'ai pas aimé les personnages, qui m'ont semblé sans saveur et interchangeables. A la fin, je ne savais plus qui était Mike et qui était Bill, je les confondais. Je me suis profondément ennuyé en lisant ce roman, même si j'ai fait l'effort d'aller jusqu'au bout. Je suis peut-être passé à côté de quelque chose.

Det er noe med klassikerne: selve lesingen er ikke alltid like oppslukende, og ofte stusser jeg over hvor banalt mye av det som blir skrevet er, likevel lukker jeg sånne bøker og tenker at jeg har fått med meg noe utenom det vanlige. Fiesta/The Sun also Rises er sånn. Jeg tror det er fordi de klarer å åpne hele verdener og drar meg inn i det - med få ord.

A classic tale of finding yourself and of living life to the fullest - which, in Hemingway's eyes, seemingly consists of bumming around Europe and getting drunk a lot. This will surprise no one who's familiar with Hemingway's life.

That being said, it's a lot more readable than a lot of the “classics” of literature from the same era, and does a good job of capturing the zeitgeist of postwar Europe, I think.

So . . . that's done. Loved the bullfighting stuff – those brief bits raised this a whole star for me. Other than that, didn't care for the characters, the story that was almost (but not quite) present, or anything. It was nice to see the phrase so oft used by [a:Robert B Parker 6921083 Robert B Parker http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66-251a730d696018971ef4a443cdeaae05.jpg] in it's first use.

Good grief. How did I get to be almost-sixty without reading this book? It's a brilliant story of a group of lost souls drifting, drifting, drifting, and it's told with the simplest of words (I'd love to see what comes up if you ran this whole book through Wordle or another word cloud generator...I can almost imagine it...I'm pretty sure “good” would be the size of the Eiffel Tower on the page.) and thousands of tiny conversations and lots of fishing and bull fighting and, of course, drinking and drinking and drinking.

There is no plot. There are just a bunch of rich people behaving badly. They have no self-respect, no boundaries. They self-medicate by drinking 24-7. They dehumanize anyone they perceive as beneath them. The characters are well drawn but there are no character arcs and no reason to care about any of them. The prose is spare, and in a lot of places reads just like a bad diary entry listing all the things they did that day, but without giving any reason for listing them. I would have DNF'd except I read it with a book club.

Summary: Jake Barnes and his well-off friends (including his old flame, Lady Brett Ashely) go on a trip together in 1924.

The book is a slow read; it intersperses numerous descriptions of scenery with short bits of action. The characters make a lot of questionable decisions, and I came away from reading the book feeling kind of scummy.

4.5* This was a fun read. Certainly lacking in description and not at all worried about the PC nature of the current era, but that is to be expected of a book published 100 years ago. If you are easily triggered this may not be the book for you, however if you enjoy a bit of fun, adventure, drinking, and razzing, then it will be your thing.