The Sun Also Rises

It’s hard to imagine, but Hemingway’s magnum opus was originally tiled Fiesta and was actually published as such in the U.K.: a party could hardly be farther from the manic cycles of depression and forced euphoria that Papa so lovingly subjects his Lost Generation characters to. One imagines him saying it with a resigned, downtrodden air, this fiesta being one in which an impotent man loses his masculine girlfriend to a young Spanish bullfighter. By whatever name, The Sun Also Rises is a singular book. What sets it apart — aside from the gender-bending, the show-stopping portrait of pre-war Spain, and the catatonic understatement throughout — is the remarkable intimacy Hemingway sustains across the book’s numerous key characters. That alone would be mastery enough, but Hemingway goes us one better, conjuring this intimacy out of the barest of prose, certainly the best available example of the author’s noted “iceberg” theory. It’s also a very strange book, with Brett (the masculine girlfriend) as one of Hemingway’s most enigmatic characters, (the most outstanding example of Hemingway’s “bitch women,” as one critic called her). Likewise, her scorned lover, Jake, has been taken for Hemingway himself, a pure sublimation of all the fears of emasculation and impotence that would dog him for life. What ties it all together is the very true depiction of the quiet suffering amidst the party life of interwar Paris that has come to define Hemingway’s generation. It’s a brisk, discordant read, certainly Hemingway’s best. As an added audio bonus, the perfectly sculpted dialog sings in William Hurt’s spot-on narration.