Books: The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)

I started this novel once before last year but had to stop because it was giving me a stifled, depressed feeling. I took it up again because despite its tone of suffocating despair, I appreciated the writing and is a Hemingway classic so I felt like I should be familiar with it.

No one does disillusionment like Hemmingway. The story follows a group of expatriates writers living in Europe, who at any given time are either eating at cafes, partying, or sleeping. A significant portion of the novel takes place during the bull fights in Spain. Along with the bull fights was a city-wide fiesta, and Hemmingway describes it with one of my favorite quotes in the book:

"All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days."

The narrator is Jake Barnes, and he tells of the events that unfold while he and his friends party at these bull fights and nurse their ensuing hangovers. Everyone is in love with Lady Ashley, who apparently is a siren of sorts who men cannot resist. She is engaged to be married, but sleeps around a lot. Nobody, including her finance, thinks this is such a terrible thing, and somehow she pulls off her amorous pursuits in a classy and controlled manner. Well until the end of the novel when she calls Jake to rescue her from a 19-year-old matador paramour.

Nobody thinks there is anything wrong with the aimless degeneracy that pervades the lives of the characters. Some hints of introspective despair surface occasionally under their nonchalant facades, but these feelings are usually suppressed with more drinking, casual sexual encounters, and/or punching one another. Amidst this debauchery, Hemingway writes everything in a calm, objective way. He spends words on descriptions of the beads of condensation on a cold glass or the white wicker chairs of the Spanish cafes, but offers no explanation or excuse for Lady Ashley's nymphomaniac tendencies or Jake's sleepy indifference to life. All that was left unsaid and not understood sometimes gave me a physical headache - there was just so much suffocating tension. I remember feeling the same way when I read A Farewell to Arms, and am thinking that Hemingway might not be great for my mental health. I did like The Old Man and the Sea though, and remember it even being inspiring at times.

The novel had an interesting storyline and good language, but I am so relieved to have finished it. On to happy, light reading after this one.