The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | Takes a while, but builds into a pretty good book

books:

The Sun Also Rises

	The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway Scribner, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 472 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

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

for more information click here

Hemingway at his best

A timeless classic -- that still moves me, even now - years after my first reading!

Takes a while, but builds into a pretty good book

I had mixed feelings about this one. It starts off a little choppy and the characters are hard to differentiate at first. Worse, most of the people in this book aren't all that likeable - they bicker continually and are often cruel to each other and everyone else they encounter (and some of them definitely express some anti-Semitic or racist sentiments.) With all that being said, though, the story and characters eventually come into focus, and I thought it turned into a fairly convincing account of disconnection, evasion, longing, disillusionment, and emotional pain. There's also a certain atmosphere that develops as the characters move through Spain drinking and fishing and sleeping with each other and fighting with each other and going to the bullfights. All of it began to feel very real to me, and I did start to feel sympathy for certain characters. Somehow the last line of the book hit me pretty hard and dramatically improved the way I felt about the entire story. I didn't like this one nearly as much as Old Man and the Sea, but the feel of the book still lingers with me.

for more information click here

Builds Into A Very Good Read

I'm 47 years old, have read thousands of books, and until this week had never read Hemingway. It was only finding myself out of town without a book that I snatched up my high school son's edition of The Sun Also Rises.

This is a very well written, relatively short novel which takes about five hours to finish at a leisurely pace. I must say, that for the first 50 pages or so, I was not impressed. Not a whole lot going on and what was happening didn't exactly get the heart racing. As the characters in the book relocated from Paris to Pamplona, however, I started to become engrossed in the story. I found myself reading later into the night, not feeling sleepy at all and not wanted to leave the story.

The novel follows a group of American and British expatriates in the interwar years (1920s) as they loll around and party their way through France and into Spain for the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. The characters are predominantly alcohol soaked wastrels whose life consists of drinking, eating, drinking, passing out, drinking, going to bull fights, drinking, eating, passing out, drinking and doing a little fishing on the side.

It is a tribute to the beautiful, highly descriptive writing of Hemingway that such a backdrop can be crafted into an entertaining read, but I must say he pulls it off. This novel has certainly motivated me to read more Hemingway.

for more information click here

The sun also rises

This is an old classic. The re-read was worth it. I noted interesting parallels with the author's (Hemingway's) real life. The descriptions of the fishing expedition in the Pyrenees was particularly good. It's still a worthwhile read, but that is the definition of a classic.

On Irony

Dave Foster Wallace urged writers to eschew irony. I feel the same way, and the reason is that for irony to have its effects the society at large must have a solid moral center of good permeating though it, like it did even after the first world war, although that center was by then seriously deteriorating. Then, when one reads a book like this, one clearly understands and is not afraid to feel the irony of this book; its amoral characters, and its nihilistic portrait.

By 2008, that center is nowhere to be found, and hence readers look for something else in any book; sympathize with the characters, to get something warm and true in the positive sense from the experience, to "enjoy" books, rather than learning a dry lesson (the spare prose helps) in the negative.

These are atrocious characters. All of them, even Cohn to whom the center of good gravitates simply because he is an old world degenerate rather than a new world one. You don't go around beating people up.

I don't know how clear I was in expressing my thoughts, but I feel that irony in writing has outlived its usefulness.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

products you might be interested in

recommendations

Highly acclaimed books that can actually be enjoyed by guys like me.
MTSMCA - AP English Lit - Optional/Suggested Reading
Travel Literature Book Discussion Group
Ten books that won't dissapoint.
Manly, Yes, But I Like It Too