Insert scenes of cafe life, fishing, reminiscences, conversations with friends, watching the bullfights, some absolutely brutal humor, and lots and lots of liquor, and you've got yourself Hemingway's first masterpiece. Somehow, they and some of their friends and acquaintances end up going to Spain to experience the Fiesta, and while their experience starts the same giddy, frenzied, hedonistic way as for most people, it ends quite differently, when the book's darker undercurrents come to light. The Jewish Robert Cohn, who learned boxing in college in order to conquer his feelings of inferiority, happens to become smitten with her as well. A very unfortunate wound left physical love a complete impossibility for him, and thus he is left gnashing his teeth watching the woman he loves run around with all sorts of men. But don't let that fool you - boring this book ain't.Jake Barnes, like most of the characters, is a veteran of World War I. All the greater because when you really look at it, there's no dramatic action going on here - just some people talking, then going to Spain to see the bullfights. And then I went and devoured the rest of the man's literary oeuvre. The Sun Also Rises is one of the few works of literature that shook me to the core, along with Remarque's Three Comrades, Gorky's autobiography, and Chekhov's The Lady With The Dog. I heartily recommend it either as an introduction to Hemingway or as a reread. It is forever youthful both in its excesses and its beauties, yet it ages quite nicely, too. 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. 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. From the cafés of Paris to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, this book is a roaming holiday. 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. You spend all your time talking, not working. It's meant to be funny, but in many ways it defines the book's sense of itself: "You're an expatriate.
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.
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. One of Hemingway's earlier works, THE SUN ALSO RISES remains one of his best.
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