The Sun Also Rises

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 cafes, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiance 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

Product Description
The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway's first big novel, and immediately established Hemingway as one of the great prose stylists, and one of the preeminent writers of his time. It is also the book that encapsulates the angst of the post-World War I generation, known as the Lost Generation. This poignantly beautiful story of a group of American and English expatriates in Paris on an excursion to Pamplona represents a dramatic step forward for Hemingway's evolving style. Featuring Left Bank Paris in the 1920s and brutally realistic descriptions of bullfighting in Spain, the story is about the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley and the hapless Jake Barnes. In an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions, this is the Lost Generation.

The book will not draw too many readers for the subject matter. Why then does the book attract? Part of the appeal has to be the same reason that many people like horror films -- the relief you feel when you realize that your own life does not encounter such dangers can be profound.

Another reason to read this book is to understand the disillusionment of the American expatriates in Europe after World War I. The book is a period piece in this sense. Clearly, Hemingway is Jake and the book is undoubtedly very autobiographical. All first novels have that quality to some degree. Imagining how the author of The Old Man and the Sea started out as Jake was very interesting to me.

To me, however, the primary reason for reading this book is to encounter the remarkable structure that Hemingway built in his plot. He has created several different lenses through which we can explore the role of conflict and separation in our lives. Each lens turns out to be looking at the same object, and it is only by slowly focusing each of the lenses that we are able to see that object more clearly.

The central figure in the book is Brett, Lady Ashley, who enchants almost every man she meets, and who disengages from intimate relations with each one after permanently entangling him emotionally. That leaves a string of wounded suitors in her wake, including Jake. Things get tough when several of them join her and her fiance in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. The symmetry in the book becomes more obvious during a fishing trip that Jake takes without Brett. The fish are lured by artificial flies more successfully than with real worms. Brett's exotic appeal draws men in like flies, much more than the attractions of women who want to make an emotional commitment.

The symmetry becomes masterful when we reach the bull fights. Brett and the matador are inevitably attracted, for they are the same. They both play with their opponents (men and bulls) by flirting and using their capes, weaken the opponents in the engagement, and bring the opponents down (through sexual entrancement and slaughter). Hemingway makes this abundantly clear by repeatedly describing the bull's death as when the matador and the bull become one. One pet name for Brett is Circe, to help complete the picture.

The closer the matador comes to the bull's horns (or Brett to making a commitment), the better the sport for the spectators and the greater the self-esteem for the matador (and Brett).

I do not recall a novel that does such an excellent job of using multiple story lines to reinforce the book's main point, in this case that alienation transcends even closeness. Much as you will dislike some of the characters, the unnecessary racial and ethnic slurs, the savageness, and the emotional scenes, you will probably find the characters to ring true. You will also admire the misguided optimism and honest commitment of Jake as he fulfills his love for Brett by procuring men for her and then rescuing her when the next engagement is all over. Jake's love is that noble sacrifice that we all admire in lovers.

And that's the beautiful part of the book -- you will find nobility amid the ugliness. The contrast makes the nobility more beautiful.

When you are done reading the book, examine your own life and see where you draw back from closeness. Then, ask yourself why you do, and what it costs you and others. Next, consider what closeness can bring from continuing relationships.

Find beauty wherever you look!

Hemingway's First Masterpiece!   March 6, 2001
Barron Laycock (Temple, New Hampshire United States)
109 out of 117 found this review helpful

This, friends, was the single book that so fatefully launched Ernest Hemingway's amazing and long-lived literary career. As such it is as close to being a legendary book as they come, yet some seventy five years after its initial publication, it still offers a story that is also surprisingly fresh, personal, and memorable. For all of his obvious excesses, Hemingway was an artist compelled to delve deliberately into painful truths, and he attempted to do so with a style of writing that cut away all of the frills and artifice, so that at it s heart this novel is meant as a exploration into what it means to be adult and alive. Thus we are introduced to Jake Barnes, a veteran of World War One, now forced by his wounds to live as a man without the ability to act like one, forced by impotence to forgo all of life's usual intimacies, and all of its associated life connections for which he so yearns. At the same time, Jake attempts to live a life of meaning and purpose, one crammed full with activity, work, and friendships. Yet it is within this network of friendships and connections that he must confront his painful circumstances.

Enter his true love, the feckless Lady Ashley, and indeed the plot thickens, for we soon see how Jake's physical affliction has painfully affected several others. Ashley loves him, but needs a virile man who can give her the physical love she needs. While Ashley is a woman of uncommon beauty, she is also virtuous enough in her won way to want the one man she truly loves to be her lover. Like all of us, she wants most that which she can never have, and so she returns to the source of her own dilemma time after time to Jake, her emotional match, the one man who cannot give her the mature emotional love she craves. So they are condemned to circle around each other, even while some of their friends and other members of the in-crowd interfere, compete, and seek Ashley's affections around the edges of the continuing affair. What we are left with is a modern tragedy, one in which the characters must somehow resolve the irresolvable.

Yet for all this emotional turmoil and existential `sturm-und-drang' of the so-called "lost generation", people drowning in the moral anomie and circumstantial wasteland created in the gutters of their own endless wants and needs, it is most often Hemingway's imaginative and spare use of the language itself that wins the reader over. Unlike his predecessors, he sought a lean narrative style that cut away at all the flowery description and endless adjectives. In the process of parsing away the excesses, Hemingway created a clear, simple and quite declarative prose style that was truly both modern and revolutionary. What one encounters as a result is a story seemingly stripped to its barest essentials, superficially more like the newspaper man's pantheon of who, what, where, when, and why, and yet somehow transformed into a much more accurate and imaginative effort, one leaving the reader with a much more artful account of what is going on. One reads Hemingway quickly, at least at first, when one learns to slow down and drink in every word and every detail as it is related. For me and for millions of others, the true genius of Hemingway is to be found in his artful use of language. This book was Hemingway's first truly successful foray into the world of letters, and the result changed the face of modern fiction. Enjoy!


Jake Barnes: Grace under pressure   September 27, 1999
37 out of 47 found this review helpful

"The Sun also Rises" made a huge impression on me when I read it as a college student a number of years ago. It is true that one must look beyond the surface to get a clear understanding of any book by Hemingway. It is also true that the language that he used was not flowery, nor overly eloquent but the meaning revealed within the lines. It is also true that the characters are often expatriates; living on the fringe of society and hedonistic to the max. All of those elements are visible here, yet sometimes it might require a magnifying glass to see it. However, these are the qualities which make Ernest Hemingway, the seminal writer for a generation and certainly one of the best.

I propose one hint when reading "the Sun also Rises." Pay close attention to the relationship between Barnes and Robert Cohn. Barnes laothes Cohn for being everything that he is not. What drives him over the edge (in the inner sanctum of his own mind and demons) is the success Cohn has insofar as his relationship with Lady Brett. Barnes is impotent and this is a crushing blow to his manhood. The tragedy here is his inability to consummate a sexual relationship with her. It destroys him--yet he is still accepting of his predicament. This is what allows this character to maintain "grace under pressure"-- as Hemingway once coined the term or the ability to stand or hold ones ground when all odds are against you. Certainly this can be a tragic flaw for any of Hemingway's male characters--the total loss of his virility. Yet he stands his ground and never loses it. He just hates Cohn from a distance and rationalizes that he (Cohn) is one who cannot do anything just for the sake of doing it---whether it be drinking, winning the Princeton boxing title, or being in love with Brett. It is complicated but one can come away with these qualities after finishing the novel rather than while reading it.

I think his friend and sometimes rival, F. Scott Fitzgerald, summed him up best when he said of Hemingway: "He's the real thing."


Ninety Percent Of An Iceberg Is Beneath The Surface   September 10, 1999
mdbumb@gsbpop.uchicago.edu (Chicago, IL)
26 out of 29 found this review helpful

Hemingway was a proponent of the "Iceberg" theory of writing: 90% of his themes are hidden beneath the surface of his books. He won't lay anything out for you in black and white -- you've got to be an active participant in the book. If that's not what you want from a book, stay away.

The Sun Also Rises is fantastic. It has Hemingway's trademark prose, a portrait of the lost generation, and most of all the saddest love story ever written. "There's no plot!" the detractors scream, but they're wrong. The plot isn't spelled out the way it is in a John Grisham novel, but it's definitely there if you pay attention.

Here's a hint for those who weren't trying very hard: this book is all about Brett Ashley and Jake. Throughout the book Hemingway shows Lady Brett following a very definite pattern. She meets a man, "falls in love" with him, sleeps with him, and dumps him. She isn't some cynical player when she does this -- she truly believes that she loves these men during her infatuations. But she requires physical proof of their love, i.e. sex, and once she has it, the infatuation dies. When the book starts we meet her latest victim, Cohn. As the book continues we see a similar relationship unfold with Romero.

But then there's Jake! She met Jake and fell in love with him, but a war injury makes him incapable of giving her the physical love she requires. As a result, poor pathetic Brett never fell out of love with Jake, and imagines him as the one man who could be the great love of her life. For the longest time Jake believes this as well.< He's seen what she did to Cohn, and he's had a ringside seat for her affair with Romero, and now he's finally realized the truth about her. When she fantasizes about the great life they could have had together, he knows it's just wishful thinking. If they could have made love, she would have dumped him just like all the others.

At it's heart, The Sun Also Rises is a book about a man falling out of love.

Hemingway's prose is a matter of opinion. Some people love his sparse verbage, others don't. If you don't care for it, try Fitzgerald, an excellent writer with a much fuller style.

One reviewer mentioned that this was one of Hemingway's earliest works, and for that reason suggested it wasn't worthy of five stars (he only gave it two). I think he said Hemingway wasn't yet a mature writer and was still trying to develop his style. What a crock -- Hemingway, like many authors, did his best work early in his career. Heck, the guy eventually committed suicide because he couldn't write anything good anymore. His more "mature" works are only passable and can't hold a candle to the earlier stuff. His prize for "The Old Man and the Sea" was more of a lifetime achievement award than anything else. So save all that "maturity and development" folderol for the black turtleneck gang at the coffee shop.

It's a great book, but it will make you work. If you want an obvious plot and themes that you don't have to think about, maybe you'd be happier with Danielle Steele.


Hemingway rules! Rargh!   February 26, 2002
Angry Mofo
23 out of 25 found this review helpful

The Sun Also Rises is one of the few works of literature that shook me to the core, along with Remarque's Three Comrades, Gorky's autobiography, and Chekhov's The Lady With The Dog. I read a page and I was hooked. Bam, just like that. I read the thing in a day. In several hours, actually. And then I went and devoured the rest of the man's literary oeuvre. It's just that great. All the greater because when you really look at it, there's no dramatic action going on here - just some people talking, then going to Spain to see the bullfights. But don't let that fool you - boring this book ain't.

Jake Barnes, like most of the characters, is a veteran of World War I. A very unfortunate wound left physical love a complete impossibility for him, and thus he is left gnashing his teeth watching the woman he loves run around with all sorts of men. The Jewish Robert Cohn, who learned boxing in college in order to conquer his feelings of inferiority, happens to become smitten with her as well. Somehow, they and some of their friends and acquaintances end up going to Spain to experience the Fiesta, and while their experience starts the same giddy, frenzied, hedonistic way as for most people, it ends quite differently, when the book's darker undercurrents come to light. Insert scenes of cafe life, fishing, reminiscences, conversations with friends, watching the bullfights, some absolutely brutal humor, and lots and lots of liquor, and you've got yourself Hemingway's first masterpiece. Every element of every great Hemingway book can be seen here - plenty of vivid descriptions; moments of strange, elegiac melancholy; the human spirit fighting against the world; loneliness, isolation, and endurance. They're all here.

For some reason, this book seems to draw accusations of anti-Semitism. And all I've to say on that topic is: What? Anti-Semitism? Here? Please, what is this you speak of? Sure, Cohn's a Jew. And sure, the characters aren't too fond of him. And yet, Hemingway presents him in a very, very sympathetic light. Sure, we're rooting for Jake Barnes because he's smarmy and witty and cool, but when we see Cohn break down in tears in his hotel room because ..., he was naive enough to _believe_ Brett loved him, how can you possibly say Hemingway had any anti-Semitic sentiments on his mind? No, no, no, and a thousand times no. This is not a book about Jews, or Americans, or Britishers. This is a book about _people_, about young people searching for substance in a world that has none, trying to build up some sort of semblance of a normal life after having been through war. This is a book about people who feel life has passed them all by, and who have nothing to really look forward to. This book is filled with the genuine bitter loneliness of people who see nothing ahead of them. The sense of hopeless longing for something better permeates every page.

The Sun Also Rises is the sound of people trying to find a purpose for themselves in an increasingly shallow world. And lest that not convince you to read it, it happens to rock .... Rarely have I read more bitingly acerbic insults and comebacks, wry and cynical remarks, and deadly accurate observations. Actually, rarely have I ever felt so drawn in to the world of a book as much as here. I identified with Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton and that Englishman they met while fishing and with the boozing Mike and with Cohn. I understood their copious drinking and verbal barb-flinging because I was struck by the moments of absolutely believable fragile vulnerability that lay underneath the surface. The subtle gestures, the shifts in tone, the tough, terse prose all added to the various effects when necessary. When I was done, the book left an indelible stamp on my mind. And what higher recommendation could anyone possibly give a book than that?