Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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105 of 114 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hemingway's First Masterpiece!, March 6, 2001
This, friends, was the single book that so fatefully launched Ernest Hemingway's amazing and long-lived literary career. As such it is as close to being a legendary book as they come, yet some seventy five years after its initial publication, it still offers a story that is also surprisingly fresh, personal, and memorable. For all of his obvious excesses, Hemingway was an artist compelled to delve deliberately into painful truths, and he attempted to do so with a style of writing that cut away all of the frills and artifice, so that at it s heart this novel is meant as a exploration into what it means to be adult and alive. Thus we are introduced to Jake Barnes, a veteran of World War One, now forced by his wounds to live as a man without the ability to act like one, forced by impotence to forgo all of life's usual intimacies, and all of its associated life connections for which he so yearns. At the same time, Jake attempts to live a life of meaning and purpose, one crammed full with activity, work, and friendships. Yet it is within this network of friendships and connections that he must confront his painful circumstances. Enter his true love, the feckless Lady Ashley, and indeed the plot thickens, for we soon see how Jake's physical affliction has painfully affected several others. Ashley loves him, but needs a virile man who can give her the physical love she needs. While Ashley is a woman of uncommon beauty, she is also virtuous enough in her won way to want the one man she truly loves to be her lover. Like all of us, she wants most that which she can never have, and so she returns to the source of her own dilemma time after time to Jake, her emotional match, the one man who cannot give her the mature emotional love she craves. So they are condemned to circle around each other, even while some of their friends and other members of the in-crowd interfere, compete, and seek Ashley's affections around the edges of the continuing affair. What we are left with is a modern tragedy, one in which the characters must somehow resolve the irresolvable. Yet for all this emotional turmoil and existential `sturm-und-drang' of the so-called "lost generation", people drowning in the moral anomie and circumstantial wasteland created in the gutters of their own endless wants and needs, it is most often Hemingway's imaginative and spare use of the language itself that wins the reader over. Unlike his predecessors, he sought a lean narrative style that cut away at all the flowery description and endless adjectives. In the process of parsing away the excesses, Hemingway created a clear, simple and quite declarative prose style that was truly both modern and revolutionary. What one encounters as a result is a story seemingly stripped to its barest essentials, superficially more like the newspaper man's pantheon of who, what, where, when, and why, and yet somehow transformed into a much more accurate and imaginative effort, one leaving the reader with a much more artful account of what is going on. One reads Hemingway quickly, at least at first, when one learns to slow down and drink in every word and every detail as it is related. For me and for millions of others, the true genius of Hemingway is to be found in his artful use of language. This book was Hemingway's first truly successful foray into the world of letters, and the result changed the face of modern fiction. Enjoy!
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120 of 134 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Space that Separates: The Two Sides of Conflict, September 18, 2000
Why would anyone want to read a novel about unending drunken revels by emotional cripples who treat each other badly, never-ending love conflicts, getting excited by mayhem at the running of the bulls and during bull fights in Pamplona, and wasted lives? That's the question posed by this book. The book will not draw too many readers for the subject matter. Why then does the book attract? Part of the appeal has to be the same reason that many people like horror films -- the relief you feel when you realize that your own life does not encounter such dangers can be profound. Another reason to read this book is to understand the disillusionment of the American expatriates in Europe after World War I. The book is a period piece in this sense. Clearly, Hemingway is Jake and the book is undoubtedly very autobiographical. All first novels have that quality to some degree. Imagining how the author of The Old Man and the Sea started out as Jake was very interesting to me. To me, however, the primary reason for reading this book is to encounter the remarkable structure that Hemingway built in his plot. He has created several different lenses through which we can explore the role of conflict and separation in our lives. Each lens turns out to be looking at the same object, and it is only by slowly focusing each of the lenses that we are able to see that object more clearly. The central figure in the book is Brett, Lady Ashley, who enchants almost every man she meets, and who disengages from intimate relations with each one after permanently entangling him emotionally. That leaves a string of wounded suitors in her wake, including Jake. Things get tough when several of them join her and her fiance in Pamplona for the running of the bulls. The symmetry in the book becomes more obvious during a fishing trip that Jake takes without Brett. The fish are lured by artificial flies more successfully than with real worms. Brett's exotic appeal draws men in like flies, much more than the attractions of women who want to make an emotional commitment. The symmetry becomes masterful when we reach the bull fights. Brett and the matador are inevitably attracted, for they are the same. They both play with their opponents (men and bulls) by flirting and using their capes, weaken the opponents in the engagement, and bring the opponents down (through sexual entrancement and slaughter). Hemingway makes this abundantly clear by repeatedly describing the bull's death as when the matador and the bull become one. One pet name for Brett is Circe, to help complete the picture. The closer the matador comes to the bull's horns (or Brett to making a commitment), the better the sport for the spectators and the greater the self-esteem for the matador (and Brett). I do not recall a novel that does such an excellent job of using multiple story lines to reinforce the book's main point, in this case that alienation transcends even closeness. Much as you will dislike some of the characters, the unnecessary racial and ethnic slurs, the savageness, and the emotional scenes, you will probably find the characters to ring true. You will also admire the misguided optimism and honest commitment of Jake as he fulfills his love for Brett by procuring men for her and then rescuing her when the next engagement is all over. Jake's love is that noble sacrifice that we all admire in lovers. And that's the beautiful part of the book -- you will find nobility amid the ugliness. The contrast makes the nobility more beautiful. When you are done reading the book, examine your own life and see where you draw back from closeness. Then, ask yourself why you do, and what it costs you and others. Next, consider what closeness can bring from continuing relationships. Find beauty wherever you look!
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Lost Generation Found, April 7, 2007
One of Hemingway's earlier works, THE SUN ALSO RISES remains one of his best. This roman à clef has it all -- drinking, misbehaving expats, more drinking, humor, sarcasm, irony, unrequited love, beautiful descriptions of Spain, did I mention drinking?, femme fatales, handsome bullfighters, fishing trips, a tad more drinking, manly-man themes, and outstanding dialogue.
About halfway through the book, a character named Bill Gorton about nails it when he tells the protagonist narrator, Jake Barnes, exactly what an expat is. It's meant to be funny, but in many ways it defines the book's sense of itself: "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 cafés."
Luckily for us, Hemingway wrote and didn't just talk, but his novel is delightfully "talky" and the reader can't resist but listen in as a beautiful Brit named Brett makes verbal love with our protagonist Jake; or as Jake mercilessly excoriates the "phony" writer Robert Cohn (yes, Virginia, there IS a whiff of anti-Semitism in play here); or as Jake and Bill engage in witty and sometimes drunken badinage as they go on their memorable fishing trip in the Spanish hills. From the cafés of Paris to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, this book is a roaming holiday. And just when things get ugly and everyone is sick to death of each other, there's the memorable scene where Jake swims into the sea as if to cleanse himself of everything -- the drinking, the fighting, the frustrating impotence. The chapter is vintage Hemingway.
While I admire some of Hemingway's later work, I still feel THE SUN ALSO RISES, along with his early short stories (IN OUR TIME, THE NICK ADAMS STORIES), remains one of his strongest works. It is forever youthful both in its excesses and its beauties, yet it ages quite nicely, too. I heartily recommend it either as an introduction to Hemingway or as a reread. It will bear up in either case.
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