🟩 The Sun Also Rises (1926) Review - She's a Maneater | Book Waffle

The Sun Also Rises (1926) written by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway. Either you love him or you hate him. A real coriander.

That's his reputation, at least. So I was pretty nervous when I first picked this up a few years back. I didn't know quite what to expect. 

I'd read a lot from the early 1900s, so I anticipated the usual. Very long and verbose descriptions. Lots of melodrama. The kind of late Romanticism that was grand and over-the-top. Maybe you've got dashes of surrealism and abstract craziness thrown in there as stream-of-consciousness begins to emerge from the mire.

Hemingway, though, is something entirely unique.

The Sun Also Rises follows the life of Jake Barnes, an American expat in Paris. He is a WWI veteran whose schlong is defective due to injuries in said war. Despite his lack of working parts, the man's got a crush on a twice divorcee named Brett. 

Scandalous!

Lady Brett Ashley is an English socialite who keeps score by racking up the broken hearts of all the men she meets. This includes Jake's pal Robert Cohn and Scottish chap Mike Campbell, who happens to be her latest fiancé.

So if you're following along at home, that means we've got three men pining after this one woman. It's a four-way love triangle, folks! Does that mean it's a love square? That can't be right...

This motley group hightails it on down to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. Under the scorching Spanish sun, these twenty and thirty-somethings booze around from bar to bar trying to find themselves at the bottom of every bottle they can get their hands on.

Hemingway is perhaps the most character-driven of character-driven writers that I've ever read. Everything is framed as an interaction. The exciting and the dull. It lends itself to lifelike set pieces. Take this excerpt from a conversation between Jake and his buddy Bill.

“I think he’s a good writer, too,” Bill said. “And you’re a hell of a good guy. Anybody ever tell you you were a good guy?”

“I’m not a good guy.”

“Listen. You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by the Anti-Saloon League. Sex explains it all. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady are lesbians under their skin.”

He stopped.

“Want to hear some more?”

“Shoot,” I said.

“I don’t know any more. Tell you some more at lunch.”

“Old Bill,” I said.

“You bum!”

Goddamn HILARIOUS, dude. Holy mother. I can see these two men so clearly. Best pals. Arms around each other. Having a laugh. What a candid exchange. Sounds like something a couple mates would tease each other with.

Mr. Grant's not bad looking, now that I think about it. Lincoln and Davis might have been on to something.

Even the smaller scenes within the novel contain dialogue that is dripping with realism. Take this snippet from another scene.

We got up from the table⁠—they had never brought us a drink⁠—and started across the street toward the Select, where Cohn sat smiling at us from behind the marble-topped table.

“Well, what are you smiling at?” Frances asked him. “Feel pretty happy?”

“I was smiling at you and Jake with your secrets.”

“Oh, what I’ve told Jake isn’t any secret. Everybody will know it soon enough. I only wanted to give Jake a decent version.”

“What was it? About your going to England?”

“Yes, about my going to England. Oh, Jake! I forgot to tell you. I’m going to England.”

“Isn’t that fine!”

“Yes, that’s the way it’s done in the very best families. Robert’s sending me. He’s going to give me two hundred pounds and then I’m going to visit friends. Won’t it be lovely? The friends don’t know about it, yet.”

She turned to Cohn and smiled at him. He was not smiling now.

“You were only going to give me a hundred pounds, weren’t you, Robert? But I made him give me two hundred. He’s really very generous. Aren’t you, Robert?”

Francis you sly dog! Milking Cohn for that extra hundred pounds. It's so good!

It paints a vivid picture of the moment without needing to constantly interrupt with tons of exposition. One line of dialogue and then piles and piles of narration and internal waffle so long that I can't even remember the thread of the conversation. 

Can you tell I'm fatigued after reviewing the Hunger Games series? I love you Suzanne, but I need a break.

There is a metric fuckton of this kind of dialogue. Real people having real conversations. A complete 180 from many other works published in the previous literary paradigm. The teasing. The banter. The awkwardness. This novel is said to embody the post-WWI Lost Generation, but I believe it is much more timeless than that. 

It's about young men and women searching for purpose in a world that is more open and free than any other time in humanity's past. And yet, the freedom to go anywhere and to love generously also feels paralyzing. Constricting. For lack of a better term, the characters feel lost. 

Can you see parallels to young people today? Because I can. Just look around. My peers are all too happy to dump their woes and anxieties onto people. Me included, if I'm being honest.

I can't fathom why some high school teachers push this on their students. If I read this when I was a teen, I would be utterly confused by the characters and their reactions.

The way this novel captures that eternal zeitgeist is nothing short of phenomenal.

Notably, the novel was based heavily on the events of Hemingway's own life, so it makes sense. Kinda weird to air your young lust by creating a literary classic, but you do you, I guess.

Hemingway in 1925s Pamplona. He is seated on the far left.
Lady Duff Twysen, the inspiration for Lady Brett, is beside him in the big hat.

HOWEVER, that's not to say the story doesn't have flaws. It does, and they are flaws inherent to Hemingway's style.

By including huge swaths of dialogue, there are bound to be some misses. Some exchanges that drag on and on. And this book, for all of its phenomenal moments, has other moments where my eyes glazed over with boredom. 

There is an art to his simple style of writing. Hell there's even a popular writing editor that bears his name. However, Iceberg Theory is a very minimalist form of prose. One that puts the onus on the reader to fill out the scene. Thus it demands a strict attention span. Mr. Hemingway speeds through the action at 100mph, and if you can't stay focused on what's happening, then the man is going to leave you in the dust. 

He doesn't bother with fanfiction nonsense where one might explain what the main character is wearing followed by a mirror scene examining every pore and pimple on their face. Hemingway decidedly says, "Do it yourself in your free time! I've got a story to tell!"

It's a lot to put on the reader's plate. Sometimes too much.

Also the plot is not exactly interesting. Lots of going to bars. Lots of drinking. Lots of wading around in the murky uncertainties of life. 

Relatable, yes. Entertaining, eh. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't.

I didn't even realize that our main character was impotent in my first reading. Missing crucial details like that really sucks. I have to think it was buried in those dull moments that kept dragging on and on. I tuned out, and I wasn't able to make that connection.

In summary, The Sun Also Rises is a refreshing take on being a Millennial/Zoomer that was published a century too early. Despite the substance of the novel being rather thin, the moment-to-moment dialogue has multiple brilliancies that paint a lively cast of characters. Here, subtle dramas are more intense and real than most grand soap operas could ever hope to be. It's a novel worth picking up, and the language is eminently approachable. Highly recommend.

🟩 Rating: 8/10