Sunday, February 27, 2011

"The Sun Also Rises" Revisited

A. Reasons that I resisted re-reading “The Sun Also Rises” (Scribner, 1926):
1. It is macho.
2. It is anti-semitic.
3. I don’t like to read about fishing (too boring).
4. I don’t like to read about bullfighting (too cruel and gory AND, somehow, simultaneously, too boring).
B. Reasons that I just re-read it anyway, for the first time since college:
1. I have been revisiting many books from those days.
2. I wanted to see how I felt about Hemingway’s style, and his short, declarative sentences, these many years later.
3. I still have a romanticized appreciation for depictions of the “Lost Generation” of Americans and their bohemian, literary life in Europe in the 1920s.
C. Reasons that I liked it again, despite myself:
1. The style is rather effective, after all.
2. I love the descriptions of the streets and cafes of Paris and of the landscapes and towns in Spain.
3. The character of Jake is intriguing, pathetic, honorable, and even endearing.
4. The doomed romance between Jake and Brett is moving.
5. Brett, despite her extreme carelessness with her various lovers’ feelings, is a woman who acts on her own desires at a time when not many women were able to do so. However, unfortunately, she never seems happy, and ends as a sad, forlorn character. (Although, come to think of it, most of the male characters end as sad, forlorn characters as well. Equal-opportunity anomie?)
D. Reservations I still have:
1. The expatriate literary generation seemed to spend a lot less time writing or working than I remembered the novel's portraying, and a lot more time drinking – drinking a LOT! Yes, they hung out in (practically lived in) the famous cafes and bars of Paris and Pamplona, but they weren’t having conversations about literature or other intellectual topics; they mainly drank (and drank and drank and drank) and spoke in short, declarative sentences that didn’t give away much.
2. The novel is still macho and anti-semitic, and I still don’t like to read about bullfighting.
 
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