This is considered one of the 100 greatest novels of all time, yet I missed it in my years of book lust. I once tried to read it last year, but got bogged down and gave up. This time I dug in and tried to focus. My impetus was reading another blog that asked 'what book setting would you love to live in?' and this book was the overwhelming favorite.

Keyword: alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol. Wine, beer, pernod, absinthe, martinis, more wine. These people drank ALL the time, from noon till midnight. Copious amounts of everything. It made me wonder if a bottle of wine was smaller in the 1920's than now, simply because I can't imagine two people putting away four bottles of wine at lunch and still being able to stand.

The story is of the 'lost generation' of expatriots living in Paris in the 20's, and several of them were WWI vets. There seemed to be no purpose to their life other than to eat, drink, and be merry. Money didn't seem to be a factor, these people were living large and leisurely. I could see why some thought Hemingway was anti-Semitic; his description of one character, Robert Cohn, implied a personal prejudice by Hemingway. But perhaps that was more indicative of that time period? Not sure.

Anyway, Jacob Barnes has a war injury that makes him unable to consummate his feelings toward Lady Brett Ashley. She passes on a relationship with him for that reason, despite her clear affection for him. So he's left to be a bystander while she flirts and sleeps around with all of his friends. In the end, they are simply left with each other, as friends. Sad, and empty. Like much of their lives.

I had to laugh at one aside that Hemingway makes: he spent pages describing the road to one town, and while the character visits a bookie, the author remarks on his bookmaking and says "but that's not part of the story". I had to laugh out loud, as so much was in this that seemed irrelevant, pages and pages of descriptions of dust and roads and people, and yet he mentioned that one piece of information as inconsequential. ( )

My favorite Hemingway to date ( )

my favorite! ( )

my favorite! ( )

This may be my favorite book of all time. At any rate, it's definitely on the top ten list and by far my favorite Hemingway (and I do love some Hemingway). The first time I read this, I loved Lady Brett Ashley. Is she a bitch? Sure, but I don't think she ever intentionally sets out to hurt anyone. And it might be argued that she has reason to be one: her first true love dies in the war from dysentery (not exactly the most noble of deaths) and she's physically threatened by Lord Ashley, forced to sleep on the floor beside him and his loaded gun (and let's clarify that,no, that's not a euphemism, just in case you're a perv). Then we have the one man who might make her happy, Jake Barnes. Poor, poor Jake, who doesn't have a gun, let alone a loaded one (yup, that's a euphemism--snicker away). I think Brett is one of the most tragic figures in American literature. Disillusioned by the war and how it irrevocably changed her life, she tries to fill the void with alcohol and sex--and destroys herself in the process.

However, upon rereading the novel, I realized how eclipsed Jake had been by Brett during my first reading. I also realized how I had misinterpreted him during my first reading. I thought Jake was as lost as the rest of the "Lost Generation," but I now believe that he is the only one who is not lost (with the exception of Bill Gorton, whose line "The road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs" may be my favorite in the book). If there's anyone with reason to give up on life, it's Jake. Does he pine for Brett? Yes. Does he come to hate Cohn for his affair with Brett? Affirmative. Does he get over Brett and realize that, even if properly equipped for a sexual relationship, a relationship with her would end as tragically as all of her other conquests? Abso-damn-lutely. After all, Brett is Circe, according to Cohn, and anyone lured into her bed will lose their manhood. The success of the relationship between Brett and Jake hinges on the fact that Jake literally has nothing to lose in this respect. ( )

William Hurts does a fine job of reading on this recording. Hemingway writes about a drunken vacation in Spain with Brett, his requited but unrequited love. Major bull fighting.

Sorry, I know this is blasphemy but I just don't get Hemingway's appeal, either in prose style or content. I had tyo force myself to endure this book. ( )

I have had very little experience with Hemingway prior to picking up this book. For some reason I had it in my head that his writing would be haughty, inaccessible and laborious to read. I was pleasantly surprised that none of my preconceptions were true.

The writing style in Sun Also Rises is fluid, simple and easy to follow. His sentences are short and easy to follow. His dialog is natural. His descriptions are straightforward and to the point.

Even though the simplicity of the style made the reading quick and easy, I quickly saw that there was a lot going on "between the lines." As terse as much of the writing is, it was apparent that what was left out was just as important (perhaps more so) than what was on the page.

As a case in point, nowhere in the book does Hemingway explicitly identify the nature of the wound that Jake received in the war. In fact, if a reader wasn't paying close attention, the importance of that wound would quickly fade into the background. However, there are plenty of clues as to the type of injury and the nature and extent that it has affected Jake's life. The injury was probably the largest case of something "not written" that was important. There were a few other instances where I felt like Hemingway was leaving out significant details while alluding to their importance.

The character development in the book was very interesting.

With the first person narrative, we only really get into Jake's head (although, as mentioned above, there's plenty of detail he leaves out even about himself) and everything is tainted by his view of life. At first his view felt fairly realistic and trustworthy but it quickly became apparent that he was jaded and cynical.

I felt like we got a pretty good feel for Cohn by the end of the novel. His character seemed to be the most straightforward and easy to understand and also seemed to follow along with the narrator's initial description of him in the opening.

Lady Brett Ashley's character was a bit more troublesome. She generally felt like a party girl who absolutely loved life and was always happy, but as the layers came back, she had more emotional depth than first expressed.

The other characters in the novel were intriguing but again it was hard to unravel their motivations and get at the heart of their character because their words and motives were often veiled by volatile or sullen behavior. The various lovers of Brett and friends of Jake were interesting but seemed to serve as reflections to play off Brett and Jake and let us gain more depth into those personalities. The drunken repartees and the random banter was funny at times, harsh at others.

The overall tone of the book was almost paradoxical. As readers, we're following around a group of expatriates as they party and travel around Europe reveling and enjoying life for all its worth. From a high level, you would think that this would be great fun. But as we drill down into the hearts and heads of these characters, the true story became rather depressive. Instead of a semi-aristocratic party crowd, in the end it felt like we were following a bunch of slovenly lounge-a-bouts who only lived for the next drink.

Both Brett and Jake had a yearning for some true emotion or passion in life but neither was able to find a clear path to that state of happiness. Instead, all of the characters lived lives of broken, or disabled, relationships. They wandered aimlessly through life spending money like water in order to try and find some sort of emotional high (or perhaps a liquor induced numbness) to detract from their otherwise unfulfilled lives.

After reading this book, I have a desire to seek out more Hemingway and read more of his stuff. I really enjoy the style he used in this book and found his characters intriguing and approachable. The story and emotions were thought provoking and effective.

Definitely recommended.

****
4 stars out of 5 ( )

This book was beautiful, and it reads to be an incredibly lonely encounter with the world.

I recommend the book for anyone who wants to understand loneliness, who wants to see what that feels like. I don't know what it means. I don't know what anything means after this book.

The story of several people drinking and being alone with one another. ( )

Those who have not seen the elephant and lack the courage to go looking for it have no right to criticize Ernest Hemingway, who set out as a young man to find the elephant and get a good long look at the Beast, and then describe it for the rest of us. As a young man he did not yet realize that few people are as brave and as honest as he.

He went. He saw. He wrote. He told us all about it -- and scarcely anyone believes him. Those who don't tell the few who do that Papa was a fool and a bad man. So it is in life as it was in "The Old Man and the Sea." Now that the big fish is dead, the little ones come to gnaw on his corpse.

Nobody with anything to lose has a friend in this world. The person who has nothing may find one. Papa knew.

'The Sun Also Rises' is the tale that moved Gertrude Stein to hang her famous "Lost Generation" label on Hemingway and his set. She was right in one sense but wrong in another: Papa was a great outdoorsman. He never got lost. ( )

It is amazing how one such as myself, a constant reader, can still find herself reading long-known, but never-read books. I have a distant memory of The Sun Also Rises; perhaps I read it a long time ago. There are many books, particularly novels considered literary in nature, that I read at too young an age to truly remember. So for me, despite this distant memory, this was my first reading of this novel.

I picked it up for two reasons: 1) Brandon said it was his favorite book and I trust his judgment; and 2) Deb said she was going to read it, and I thought it would be nice to read a book along with her and discuss. So around nine o'clock tonight I started reading. It is now midnight and I have finished. I should have read slower, taken more in, but I was fascinated and hence absorbed the novel a paragraph at a time. Maybe tomorrow I will re-read with a more analytical perspective, but for now it was enough to experience.

Two words come to mind after reading this novel: broken and bittersweet. The people in this novel are broken, leading superficially frivolous lives. But the tone, to me, is not one of judgment or condemnation, but rather bittersweet in its treatment of this group who have been made empty. Even the character who could be most despised because of her treatment of men and refusal to forgo sex for love is made pitiful to the reader.

I will definitely be re-reading this novel with a clearer head soon. ( )

Direct style with powerful simple phrasing. The justaposition of Jake, whwho has a war injury to the groin, and Lady Brett Ashley is full of anguish and unresolved love. ( )

My favorite novel by Hemingway. Gives a better picture of the 'Lost Generation' than A Moveable Feast. ( )

When I was a teenager, I spent most of my summers reading. All my friends lived across town, no one had a car, and none of us had money to do much of anything, so I passed the time as best I could with everything from War and Peace to Hemingway to trashy science fiction paperbacks to even trashier Sidney Sheldon. I’d like to say that I found every word fascinating, but that would be a lie. I don’t remember anything about the plot of War and Peace. I didn’t enjoy Hemingway. Mostly, the Sidney Sheldon was what stuck with me, to tell the truth.

I know I read The Sun Also Rises then, though my recollection of it even as I read it now as an adult was hazy at best. I certainly enjoyed it more this time around. Perhaps there are certain tools we need to develop, as readers, to be able to connect with what we are reading. Not necessarily the specific experience; I still haven’t seen the bulls run at Pamploma, but I didn’t need to in order to understand what the bull-fighting meant to Jake Barnes, to Brett Ashley, to the matador in the ring, or to feel the strange ennui of Paris or of the fiesta and the bright sunlit respite of fishing in the Irati River. Life experience, maybe, though I’m not sure I speak for anyone other than myself.

I was drawn in this time, despite myself, into seeing through Jake’s eyes, both the sights and the people around him. It was a gradual thing but mostly came on in the middle section, where Jake and his friend Bill go on the fishing trip together, sandwiched between the bustling cafes and nightclubs of Paris and the never-ending party of their trip to Spain. This was also a momentary break between the dramas revolving around Brett Ashley, the woman Jake loves but cannot claim, as he is left impotent by a war injury. Brett feels like a flawed depiction of a modern woman: she is oversexed and objectified, and yet emasculates the men around her. It is easy to see her that way, but in the end, in context, I think she is more layered than that, and also sadder. In his usual manner, Hemingway spends paragraphs to describe the nameless peasants riding in a bus beside our narrator, but only a handful of words to depict that narrator’s love interest. We see Brett’s actions through Jake’s eyes, but Jake, and the author, does not elaborate, does not explain their meaning to us. That is left to the reader to decipher, and my experience was that it was necessary to do so, to see Brett as more than what she appears on the page.

In his notes for this novel, Hemingway wrote: “Robert Cohn is the hero.” I confess I cannot follow where the author leads in this regard. Of greatest disturbance to most readers is the anti-Semitism directed almost casually at Cohn by even his friends, but that was not what troubled me; I felt it was a case of Hemingway depicting that prejudice in his characters, not expressing intolerance of his own. It is more that, seeing Cohn through Jake’s eyes, and even through Brett’s and their other friends’, I was unable to see anything noble in him, anything admirable, anything heroic.

Hemingway’s novel is not perfect by any means, but it is a near-perfect encapsulation of the Lost Generation’s disillusionment after World War I, their dissatisfaction and search for some sort of peace of the soul, now that they have respite from war. The theme of disillusionment has been echoed in modern fiction and cinema many times, each time the story playing out much the same. As Hemingway chronicled his era, so did J.D. Salinger write of the transition from World War II to the Baby Boomers, The Big Chill looked at the passage from hippie to yuppie, and St. Elmo’s Fire looked at the disenchantment of young professionals in the 80s and 90s. Disparate in style, there is a common thread there, one that clearly resonates with readers and viewers again and again. ( )

I reread this recently and enjoyed it, though not as much as when I read it in high school. The clean sentences still appealed to me, though I found the way Jake's wound was not directly mentioned to be, well, dare I say gimmicky?Almost directly after I finished, I had the great fortune to stumble upon Joyce Carol Oates's novella, "Papa at Ketchum" a fiction of Hemingway's last days. It was kind of an amazing pairing. ( )

This was the first of Hemmingway's novels that I read (though I am familiar with his short stories). I love the flow of his prose; it feels almost percussive, short and sharp. ( )

Vanity, vanity. All is vanity.

Solomon had a lot to say about that sort of thing. He claimed that the day to day activities were, effectively, meaningless, as there was "nothing new under the sun," no matter how many times the sun rises and sets.

Meet the Lost Generation. They're people in a country not their own, fighting in wars that are not their own, living with people that are not their own, and living lives that are not their own. They are, after all, lost.

Meet Jake, the epitome of frustration. After having lost a vital piece of his essence in the war, he is unable to be "more than friends" with his love interest. Brett. And she, regardless of how Jake feels, makes him feel even worse every time she gets a new boyfriend, including the boy-who-would-be-a-man (or was it the man-who-was-a-boy?) bullfighter.

Jake tries to come to grips with his situation, which seems pretty hopeless, hoping to get his mind off Brett and how he can never be with her.

A wonderful work on the part of Hemingway, and definitely worth reading by any fan of the author. Side effects may include severe depression, loss of direction, and advanced stages of literary snobbery. ( )

I am not an aficionado of Hemingway's writing. His style is nice. It's a swell style. But it is too easy to parody. ( )

Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, is one of my favorite books. This was the first book I'd ever read by Hemingway and it totally changed my outlook on what a good book really is. Hemingway not only drags you into the lives of the characters but he submerges you in their self-destructive and wild lifestyles, all done in such a matter of fact manner that is over all quite captivating. The Sun Also Rises is not a novel of fast paced, full action exciting events it is simply life particularly the life of Jake (the protagonist). Its a sad and realistic story of everything that happens in such short time and in the end at last you get something that tells you 'this book made sense and yes we do have reason'. To put it lamely you get hope in the pure shining fact that "The Sun Also Rises.

....This was my first book review by the way :)

I've always wanted to read this one; and a lovely BCer sent it to me. I aim to read it this year. If not, next year. ( )

As it says on the back cover, this book encapsulates the angst of the so-called "Lost Generation" after World War I. It has less plot and more art than I am used to in my books, but I forced myself to continue reading and ended up quite enjoying it. The primary metaphor of the novel is that of bulls and steers--bulls (both actual bulls and most human males) being violent idiots that need to be corralled and made part of the herd by steers (both actual steers and guys like our first person narrator, Jake, who lost his manhood in the war). The center of everyone's attention is Lady Brett Ashley, who pretty much gets with everyone (or everyone wants to get with her), including Robert Cohn and a bullfighter in Pamplona, but not, of course, her apparent true love, Jake. She is a corrosive influence on Jake and the "bulls" (and on the bullfighter, who gets beat up over her), and the book ends with Brett saying, "Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together," and Jake answering, "Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?" Jake and the reader know that probably isn't true.

Plot-wise, not much happens. They are in Paris, then go fishing, and then to the week-long fiesta in Pamplona (running of the bulls, bull-fights, and more often than not, eating and drinking to excess). At the end, Jake goes to Madrid to get Brett. Hemingway is, indeed, a sparse writer--something about the prose drives you on quickly to the end. Also one of the quickest books I've read (2 days). Interesting read and experience (12 years late--was assigned for an AP English class I dropped). ( )

Amazing how fresh this feels. ( )

Love Hemingway's images and characterizations. Written so simply. A story of an impotent man and the girl who strings him along. ( )

The first Hemingway novel I've read in a very long time, and it totally redeemed the writer for me. The episodic story of Jake Barnes and Lady Ashley, together with their friends was much more than their drunken sprees, fishing in the Pyrennes, and the bulls running in Pamplona. This time the language absolutely caught me up in the atmosphere and time period between two world wars. ( )

yet another classic. ( )