The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition
The only authorized edition of Ernest Hemingway's first novel. "The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost." --The Wall Street Journal The Sun Also Rises is a classic example of Hemingway's spare but powerful writing style. It celebrates the art and craft of Hemingway's quintessential story of the Lost Generation--presented by the Hemingway family with illuminating supplementary material from the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library. 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 is "an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative...a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard, athletic prose" (The New York Times). The Hemingway Library Edition commemorates Hemingway's classic novel with a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, the author's sole surviving son, and an introduction by Sean Hemingway, grandson of the author. Hemingway considered the extensive rewriting that he did to shape his first novel the most difficult job of his life. Early drafts, deleted passages, and possible titles included in this new edition elucidate how the author achieved his first great literary masterpiece.
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Community Reviews
Having read dozens of classic novels but never Hemingway, I decided to give this one a go. What a huge disappointment, and I don't see why this was the book that catapulted Hemingway into a pantheon of great writers.
Almost none of the elements of what constitute good fiction are in this book, such as any emotional or psychological growth among the characters. The main character, Jake, is really Hemingway, and this novel is a barely disguised diary of his time in Europe wasting time in cafes and bars with his friends, talking about their inability to write (hint: maybe it's because they were always drunk?) and in particular, his famous travels to Spain to watch and write about the bull-fights that mesmerized him. It is also about the love and lust several of the characters, including Jake, have for Lady Brette Ashley, a not-quite-divorced, penniless, beautiful and reckless woman who continually runs off with men she has just met, notwithstanding her engagement to Mike. She is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but her total lack of judgment, total lack of consideration for the feelings of others, and inability to pull her life together, don't earn sympathy in my book.
In fact, the only character who I found even slightly sympathetic is the one Hemingway tries to make unsympathetic: Robert Cohn, a Jewish friend who became a boxer in part "to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton." Part of my disappointment in this book is that Hemingway opens the story writing absorbingly about Cohn, but then he lets Cohn disappear from the narrative for a very long time, leaving the reader to wonder what role he will play later in the story. Cohn also loves Brette (who doesn't?) and while his judgement in women is just as bad in this regard as all the rest of the men who fall for her, I felt his pain at having been able to run away with her for a week or so and then, as all her other lovers, get unceremoniously dumped for a newer face. Also, he knows he is disliked in this sophisticated crowd for being a Jew. Mike refers to Cohn as a kike, along with other nasty terms.
Having just read The Paris Wife, a pretty good historical novel about Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, I also knew that The Sun Also Rises makes no mention of Hadley as a character, though they were married at the time of these experiences and she was with him in these travels. Though he dedicates the book to her, Hadley must have been enormously hurt to have been written out of this narrative, which Hemingway finalized with the help of one of his many drinking buddies, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Giving credit where credit is due, Hemingway's spare style of writing, often the subject of parody, can be arresting, but the repetition of the most mundane details is tiresome, as is much of the narrative:
"I feel sorry about Cohn," Bill said. "He had an awful time."
"Oh, to hell with Cohn," I said.
"Where do you suppose he went?"
"Up to Paris."
"What do you suppose he'll do?
"Oh, to hell with him."
Jake is almost alarmingly empty as a character; he is seemingly moved only by the artistry of the gifted matador and his love for the unattainable, impossible Brette, but his voice, Hemingway's voice, is stilted, spare and ultimately unsympathetic.
The title of the book comes straight from Ecclesiastes, from which Hemingway quotes when the book opens, but the characters in the book usually miss the sunrise because they are sleeping off their mindless drunkenness from the night before. Maybe this "Lost Generation" wouldn't have been quite so lost if they had all met at an AA meeting instead and made something of their lives.
Almost none of the elements of what constitute good fiction are in this book, such as any emotional or psychological growth among the characters. The main character, Jake, is really Hemingway, and this novel is a barely disguised diary of his time in Europe wasting time in cafes and bars with his friends, talking about their inability to write (hint: maybe it's because they were always drunk?) and in particular, his famous travels to Spain to watch and write about the bull-fights that mesmerized him. It is also about the love and lust several of the characters, including Jake, have for Lady Brette Ashley, a not-quite-divorced, penniless, beautiful and reckless woman who continually runs off with men she has just met, notwithstanding her engagement to Mike. She is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but her total lack of judgment, total lack of consideration for the feelings of others, and inability to pull her life together, don't earn sympathy in my book.
In fact, the only character who I found even slightly sympathetic is the one Hemingway tries to make unsympathetic: Robert Cohn, a Jewish friend who became a boxer in part "to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton." Part of my disappointment in this book is that Hemingway opens the story writing absorbingly about Cohn, but then he lets Cohn disappear from the narrative for a very long time, leaving the reader to wonder what role he will play later in the story. Cohn also loves Brette (who doesn't?) and while his judgement in women is just as bad in this regard as all the rest of the men who fall for her, I felt his pain at having been able to run away with her for a week or so and then, as all her other lovers, get unceremoniously dumped for a newer face. Also, he knows he is disliked in this sophisticated crowd for being a Jew. Mike refers to Cohn as a kike, along with other nasty terms.
Having just read The Paris Wife, a pretty good historical novel about Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, I also knew that The Sun Also Rises makes no mention of Hadley as a character, though they were married at the time of these experiences and she was with him in these travels. Though he dedicates the book to her, Hadley must have been enormously hurt to have been written out of this narrative, which Hemingway finalized with the help of one of his many drinking buddies, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Giving credit where credit is due, Hemingway's spare style of writing, often the subject of parody, can be arresting, but the repetition of the most mundane details is tiresome, as is much of the narrative:
"I feel sorry about Cohn," Bill said. "He had an awful time."
"Oh, to hell with Cohn," I said.
"Where do you suppose he went?"
"Up to Paris."
"What do you suppose he'll do?
"Oh, to hell with him."
Jake is almost alarmingly empty as a character; he is seemingly moved only by the artistry of the gifted matador and his love for the unattainable, impossible Brette, but his voice, Hemingway's voice, is stilted, spare and ultimately unsympathetic.
The title of the book comes straight from Ecclesiastes, from which Hemingway quotes when the book opens, but the characters in the book usually miss the sunrise because they are sleeping off their mindless drunkenness from the night before. Maybe this "Lost Generation" wouldn't have been quite so lost if they had all met at an AA meeting instead and made something of their lives.
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