Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Featured Book
[In which a late-blooming bookworm finally gets to the stuff he really should have read already.]
The Plot, Basically: A bunch of erudite drunks drink in Paris, then meet up in Spain to get drunk and watch bullfights and get drunk some more.
The Plot — All of It: It’s not long after World War I, and Paris is full of American expatriates with a lot of time on their hands. Some are rich gadabouts or mooching artists, but not our boy Jake Barnes. He’s actually got a job, filing reports for a wire service (not entirely sure what that entails, don’t need to).
Jake takes it relatively easy on the booze, which isn’t easy since his friends like to get shitfaced and have serious conversations pretty much nightly. The thing is, Jake’s actually got some decent sorrows to drown, No. 1 being an old war wound that has rendered him impotent (not the shooting blanks kind, but the much worse not-shooting-at-all).
Which sucks, because while he and Lady Brett Ashley totally love each other and say so all the time, she’s not about to give up sex. Don’t judge — she’s a hot, vivacious Brit in the city of lights in an age of unprecedented sexual freedom and at this moment, sex is kind of her thing. Though she’s got two exes and one fiancé lying in wait, she refuses to pin herself down; throughout the book she gets with several of the dudes in Jake’s extended circle of frenemies. Meaning he’s always got a seat in the wings for her erotic exploits.
Spoiler Alert: All the frustration and jealousy boils over when everybody meets up in Pamplona to run with the bulls and get blitzed. There’s a testosteruption when Brett seduces an ultra-virile 19-year-old all-star matador as her fiancé, her most recent ex-boyfriend, and Jake all bear uncomfortable witness. Fists start flying. Friends say untake-back-able things. Mass hysteria.
The Themes: Yeah there’s bullfighting and dude-fighting, but the real tension comes from our scar-crossed lovers. Jake and Brett’s love isn’t unrequited, it’s physically unrequitable, the kind of thing you usually only find in the sci-fi and fantasy realms: man + statue (Pygmalion), girl + vampire (Twilight), snowman + stove (Hans Christian Andersen’s insane fable “The Snowman”). I’m told Jeffrey Eugenides’s characters in Middlesex suffer fleshly incompatibilities (in a bent-gender kinda way); I’ll have to check that out.
The Narrator: William freaking Hurt, people. Dude’s got a voice like a velvet ashtray, a snug fit for Jake’s blunt, achy narration. He nailed all the peripheral accents, too, even Georgette, the blasé French prostitute.
The Verdict: This is a dark and dirty book, full of alcohol, sex and the kind of world-weary malaise you just want to wallow in for a weekend. I love the way Hemingway lightly bats around gender roles, like a wise old cat toying with a mouse. Brett, with her tomboyish haircut and ballsy joie de vivre, is the perfect flipside to Jake’s burnt-out, soft-serve masculinity.
Word-wise, Hemingway was damned genius, a master of direct, deliberate prose that leaves all nonessential details to the imagination. This makes The Sun Also Rises one of the most quotable books on the planet. For example:
Quote that Haunts Me: “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
Quote I’ll Try to Use in Social Settings: “I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.”
Quote I’ll Probably Never Get to Use in Social Settings: “This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”
Quote I Definitely Can’t Use in Social Settings: “I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.”
Quote I Can’t Write Here Even Though It’s Devastatingly Brilliant Because It’s the Last Line of the Book and I Don’t Want to Rob You of That: [Redacted. Just wait till you get to it.]
In Summary: If I’d known how awesome this book was, I would’ve read it when all the cute girls first recommended it to me back in the day. Alas, you can lead a fool to the Parisian absinthe café, but you can’t make him drink.
