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The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

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Feb 16, 2008 Werner rated it did not like it

Shelves: classics, general-fiction

Note, July 15, 2024: I've just made a slight factual correction to a background detail of this review.

In the case of books I've read but disliked, I often indicate that fact with a one-star rating, so people browsing my shelves won't be misled as to my tastes. Some Goodreaders object to the practice of giving single-star ratings without a review to explain why; one likened it to a drive-by shooting. Mindful of their point, I've tried to go back and add reviews in some of these cases; and (to ke Note, July 15, 2024: I've just made a slight factual correction to a background detail of this review.

In the case of books I've read but disliked, I often indicate that fact with a one-star rating, so people browsing my shelves won't be misled as to my tastes. Some Goodreaders object to the practice of giving single-star ratings without a review to explain why; one likened it to a drive-by shooting. Mindful of their point, I've tried to go back and add reviews in some of these cases; and (to keep the shooting metaphor) this is one where I'm quite glad to come back and pump a few more bullets into the corpse. :-)

As the glowing Goodreads description indicates, Nobel laureate Hemingway is a critical establishment darling, so anybody panning his work risks condemnation as a philistine or worse. In my friends circle, ratings of this book range from five stars to one (and points in between), and some of the former come from friends whose judgment I respect a lot more than I do that of most critics. Of course, literary tastes are subjective; so I can only indicate how and why the work impressed (or failed to impress) me, for whatever that's worth. (As another friend sometimes says, "Your mileage may vary.") It's probably worth noting that I read this while I was in high school, and while it wasn't assigned by a teacher, I read it as something one had to read in order to be "educated." So I wasn't really drawn to it on its own merits; that may have been a factor that helped color my reaction, though a negative reaction didn't need much help.

To begin with, there's the matter of what the author of the Goodreads description (who was probably writing a jacket blurb!) calls the author's "spare but powerful" style: a limited-vocabulary, staccato, sometimes repetitive diction that's averse to adjectives, adverbs and most description of any kind. If prose were bread loaves, this would definitely be industrially-baked, thin-sliced white bread that dissolves in the mouth like slush and is more or less tasteless. It's significant that, despite the critical adulation of Hemingway as a stylist, this way of writing is virtually unique to him; it's usually explained in textbooks as a result of his background in newspaper journalism, but I've never encountered any newspaper story that affected this style, and no subsequent fiction writers I know of have chosen to imitate him (though a few have dared to parody him, sometimes to hilarious effect). There's just so much verbal richness to the English language, in vocabulary and syntax, so many expressive possibilities, that are simply lost here! So, especially given that the English-language writers I admire the most as stylists --Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, Tanith Lee, and others-- have a much lusher, more fulsome style, it might be expected that I'm not an admirer of Hemingway's. Before reading this novel, I'd been exposed to it in some of his short fiction; I didn't like it there, and didn't appreciate it here.

More importantly, there are the more substantial matters of message, plot, and characters. Basically, the premise here can be summed up as: socially useless expatriates in Paris, whose worldview is comprised of cynicism, nihilism and hedonism, sit around killing time by drinking, fornicating, being bored, and going on jaunts to other places where they can sit around and do the same. That also pretty much summarizes the plot; if you're looking for eventful storytelling, examinations of constructive human relationships, a tale of some goal achieved or conflict undertaken, moral choices made or principles stood upon, you won't find it here. Of course, Hemingway was following the adage, "Write what you know;" (Jake Barnes could be his alter ego). He was part of a vast sea of human flotsam that came out of World War I with their shallow beliefs destroyed, and nothing to put in their place, convinced that life is futile; and he wrote this novel as a literary testament to that conviction. The symbolism of the title expresses the thought in a nutshell, being taken from the epigraph from Ecclesiastes (having been raised in a Congregational church, Hemingway was familiar with the Bible); the quoted verses make it clear that from a purely earth-bound perspective, human life is a cycle of vanity that doesn't go anywhere but in the same pointless circle. (For the Biblical writer, of course, in context, this is balanced by an awareness of the divine and transcendent that breaks the circle; but there's no such awareness here.) Since the literary critical establishment of the mid-20th century came out of the same "lost generation" (to quote the novel's other epigraph), this is the kind of self-referential, navel-gazing literature that they could eat up with a spoon and solemnly declare to be Great Truth. But if you recognize that life and the universe are meaningful, this doesn't come across as Great Truth, but as whiny drivel from people who need to grow up and get a life. Nor does it really succeed as a literary portrait to help us understand what makes these people tick, or to present it alongside the backdrop of an alternative; Hemingway isn't perceptive enough to analyze what makes his characters this way, and he hasn't got an alternative.

To be sure, there's a kind of vestigial plot, in the form of a triangle of sorts (I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "love" triangle) involving Jake, Lady Brett Ashley, and Robert Cohn --the latter two have a brief sexual dalliance, and the former two are quite scandalized that he's so gauche as to expect it to be anything more. (The reader might be scandalized, too --but not by that.) But none of these characters are likeable enough to arouse any emotional connection, or caring one way or the other about what they do or who they end up with --at least, I didn't. The book did, though, evoke one emotional reaction: resentment and distaste for its anti-Semitic undercurrent. Hemingway takes pains to note Cohn's Jewishness, paints him in as unflattering a light as he can, even compared to the other characters, and puts in one character's mouth the line, "Brett's gone off with men. But they weren't ever Jews, and they didn't come and hang about afterward." (This represents, of course, the author's way of trying to hurt the feelings of his nominal friend Gertrude Stein, towards whom he harbored pretty ambivalent feelings that included a hefty component of resentment.) If the critics hadn't already canonized this book before the Nazis gave anti-Semitism a bad name in respectable circles, one suspects it wouldn't be so highly rated today.

So, if this book "educated" me with any lesson, it was that I never wanted to read another Hemingway novel. :-) One might assume that this was an adolescent negative reaction to fiction from that era. But at the same time of my life, I read and liked works by such Hemingway contemporaries as Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and Arthur Koestler. Nor is it a blanket rejection of fictional writers with Hemingway's worldview --Lovecraft was, like Hemingway, an atheist and materialist (and from the same generation), but he became one of my favorite writers. He also produced a body of fiction that has something to offer in terms of literary enjoyment and rewards, whether you accept his worldview or not. Alas, that's not something I personally can say of Hemingway. ...more

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Feb 02, 2014 Crystal marked it as 2014-to-read · review of another edition

Nov 15, 2012 Jacob rated it really liked it

Jan 07, 2023 Amber marked it as to-read

Jul 16, 2012 Emily Sears Cook marked it as to-read

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