Do you remember the line in Don McLean’s 1971 song American Pie...the day the music died? Well, when Ernest Hemingway published his first novel The Sun Also Rises in 1926...it was the day descriptive writing died. Other than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, Hemingway’s style changed the way authors wrote from descriptive to non-descriptive. Paris in the 1920s was home for The Lost Generation, a group of American expatriates along with some European writers and artists who, led by Gertrude Stein, rejected the American way of writing and painting (Picasso was a member of the group). The group was young and rebellious. Besides Hemingway, the group included American writers, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, and Irish novelist James Joyce. And did they drink! They were seen daily in the Ritz, Cafe de la Paix, the Rotonde, La Closerie des Lilas, the Bois, and all the other prime restaurants and bars in Paris. I’m only bringing this up because this style of living is inspired throughout his first novel. Also, I have to admit that I love reading about that era (see my 2/17/2017 review of Everybody Behaves Badly). Anyway, I wanted to give you the flavor of the times in order for you to enjoy the novel to the nines. BTW, besides writing, drinking, and dining, the group also loved boxing and bullfighting.
The story itself is a microcosm of the Lost Generation with a Cormac McCarthy approved five main characters: The narrator, Jake Barnes (obviously Ernest Hemingway), Lady Brett Ashley, Mike Campbell, Robert Cohn, and Bill Gorton along with an interesting sidebar character, Count Mippipopolous. On a fishing trip to Spain, Bill said to Jake, “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.” Jake answered with, “It sounds like a swell life...When do I work?” Bill says, “You don’t work. One group claims women support you, Another group claims you’re impotent.” After the fishing trip, Jake and Bill head to Pamplona for the running of the bulls (history tells us that Hemingway did participate) and bullfight watching. There they finally meet their late-arriving friends, Brett, Mike, and Robert at the Hotel Montoya. “Where the hell have you been? Asked Jake. Brett blames Robert for all the delays. On the way to the corrals, they passed a wine shop with a sign in the window: Good wine 30 centimos a liter. “That’s where we’ll go when funds get low,” Brett said. Throughout the novel, it becomes apparent (that) their wine funds will never be low. You wonder how these heavy drinkers were able to produce novels considered literary masterpieces. You have to remember when you are reading this novel Hemingway was only writing about activities that he was actually participating in. They really wined and dined deliberately every day. Like Jake said, “It sounds like a swell life.” Haha.
Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (The Old Man And The Sea), although I find his style easy to follow...it's somewhat bland. Where Hemingway’s character might say, “I see a red rose.”, a descriptive writer like Robert Louis Stevenson (which I prefer) might write, “I see a long-stemmed cardinal red rose with dew-covered petals and sharp prickles.” That’s all I’m saying...reviewers are writers too, haha. F. Scott Fitzgerald befriended Ernest Hemingway and the modernist Lost Generation, but never changed his descriptive style. I did enjoy Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises but struggled to find any plot. Yet Hemingway’s story of Cuban fisherman Santiago in The Old Man And The Sea (his last novel) actually displayed some descriptive writing and a plot. Go figure. BTW, wasn't Spencer Tracy fabulous in the movie version? Bung-o!
RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
Comment: I know that The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway’s first novel, but all of his life pleasures are displayed in his novel. Some facts about Hemingway’s life:
He was an ambulance driver in the Italian front during WWI where he was wounded.
As a journalist, he covered The Spanish Civil War.
He was a foreign correspondent during WWII.
In 1954 he had two successive plane crashes in Africa that caused the start of his physical deterioration.
In 1961 Hemingway deliberately shot himself with his favorite double-barreled shotgun in Idaho. His wife initially told the press that it was accidental.
Many people believe that Hemmingway had CTE from all his concussions which would explain the suicide...a major reason for the NFL player's rash of suicides.
