Country: USA
Genre: Literary
Pages: 251
I have read quite a bit in the last ten years, I wouldn't call myself "well-read" yet, but I have run through a considerable number of fine writers during the last decade, but I have yet to read a more skillful chronicler of the human experience than Hemingway. Armed with honesty, simplicity and a strong will to understand the landscapes of human nature, Hemingway has charmed generations of reader with a prose complex in its layered representation, but concise and easy of access.
The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's first published novel. Some would argue that it's The Torrents Of Spring, but its diminutive size makes it a novella, according to most critics. Like most first time novelists, Hemingway's first story is one that is very close to the life he was living at the moment.
Jakes Barnes is an expatriate writer, working in Paris for a newspaper, spending all his free time in cafés and bars with other American and British fellows, notably fellow writer Robert Cohn, noble lady Brett Ashley, her husband Mike Campbell and Barnes' closest friend during the story, Bill Gorton. The group doesn't get along too well and stick together because they're all they have to remind each other of who they are. The expatriates move from bars to bars and then from city to city and country to country in order to find experience that would define themselves and justify their defection from the country. But their aimless drifting is getting drowned in alcohol and their illusions shatter against the hard reality.
The central piece of Hemingway's novel is Lady Brett, whose dazzling beauty is leaving a trail of stunned men in her wake (Ava Gardner played Lady Brett on the big screen). Jake, Robert, Mike and more or less every male protagonist in the novel fall in love with her at some point, only to get rebutted by the Lady who has all she wants and therefore doesn't know what to yearn for anymore. The most beautiful relationship is the triangle in between her , Jake and the self-involved, yet fragile Robert Cohn. Lady Brett will drag both men down with desire and bring the worse out of both, especially out of Cohn, who will make a fool of himself many times, displaying his vulnerability to his peers.
One of the beauty of Hemingway's "athletic" prose is the breathing room he leaves to his characters. They often lead long discussions without any narrative break and have a chance to display their nature by themselves rather to see it enunciated by the writer. He keeps it short and incredibly accurate, save for a few interludes about fishing and bullfighting in Spain (both subjects which Hemingway had a passion for). The Sun Also Rises was published in an eerie parallel with Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (not that eerie, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were drinking buddies), and both novels show similarity. Where Fitzgerald's work shows more character and story depth, Hemingway's story is more eager to butt characters against each other in order to find whose yearning are the most righteous.
Some would describe Hemingway's first novel as being a bit bland and plotless, which is somewhat true. Expatriate writers are a select group and it can be hard for the working man to reach to their existential anxiety and other diverse longings. The point Hemingway tried to make with his novel is very precise: you will never escape who you are. He's sometimes juggling around the point, but the novel is kept short for this reason. The Sun Also Rises is a great testimony to the fatality in human longing: the truth doesn't lie elsewhere, waiting to be found, it's within and sometimes you might not like it. A courageous novel for its time that defined not only the rest of Hemingway's career, but a good chunk of the twentieth century fiction.
SCORE: 83%
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