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The Sun Also Rises: The Authorized Edition
The Sun Also Rises: The Authorized Edition
The Sun Also Rises: The Authorized Edition
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The Sun Also Rises: The Authorized Edition

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Originally published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style.​

A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. In his first great literary masterpiece, Hemingway portrays an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.

“The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost.” —The Wall Street Journal

Editor's Note

An expat’s ennui…

A novel of dispassionate decadence, Hemingway’s roman à clef portrays a sense of ennui that is as relevant today as it was in the Roaring Twenties.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateJul 25, 2002
ISBN9780743237338
The Sun Also Rises: The Authorized Edition
Author

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961. 

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Rating: 3.891891891891892 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Doing a re-read of the novel for the Seasonal Reading Challenge (Fall 2009). I loved this book when I studied it in high school, so it will be interesting to see if I feel the same way about it now.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The whole novel I kept thinking about what kind of novel would the Robert Cohn novel be. Like, we were watching those bit players get drunk. And, really, devoting an entire novel to these rich (well, minus Mike OF COURSE) expats was a little boring at times. All I could think was, how crazy is it that we're not even getting the whole story because these narrators are all so drunk and high that most of the time they are secluding in their own little world and can barely see past their own noses. I bet if we heard from Cohn (don't even get me started on how tired I was getting about hearing about Jews and black people and all of the other insanely offensive terms and stereotypes Hemingway uses) we would see a much more honest account of all that was going on. I wish we could have that novel, too.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    After, reading The Paris Wife, I was disappointed in The Sun Also Rises. So many of the scenes are repeated in both books, with more detail in The Paris Wife. All the drinking and carousing and fighting becomes too much. The relationships are sketchy in both books. The bull fighting and fishing are very detailed. I would venture to say that The Sun Also Rises is a book that most men would enjoy, but I felt under currents of homosexuality.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    After reading this book about the lost generation I felt a little lost. The writing is sparse but the Fiesta at Pamplona, the bullfights and 1920s Paris is well portrayed. The book begins by introducing a character and then switching to the main character Jake who then meets up with the femme fatale, Blake, funny name for a girl, but in the end the plot never really comes together. The first character disappears, and the supposed romance between Jake and Blake is muted and the best part is the Bullfights. Only read if you are a big fan of Hemingway.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jake Barnes is an expat in Paris, working for a newspaper, and circulating with his small circle of friends. On his annual trip to the fiesta in Pamplona there is the spectacle of the bulls but also the spectacle as his own small social circle starts to implode.Hemingway's novel is perhaps a bit lost on me. The narrative is rather straight forward, the language itself rather simplistic and yet extremely evocative. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic. And while the novel is considered one of the great works of fiction of "the lost generation" I'm not sure that I picked up on all of the themes and concepts Heminway is exploring. Definitely a novel that I would love to take apart in a classroom setting to really start digging into the text.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love this book. It's one of my all-time favorites and I've read it every few years since I was in junior high school.The narrator, Jake Barnes, is an American reporter living in Paris in the 1920's. The book has a very loose plot that centers around his friends' lives as expatriates and their travel to Pamplona, Spain to watch the bullfighting matches during the Fiesta. Woven throughout the story is Jake's romantic interest in Lady Brett Ashley. He sits by and watches as she becomes involved with most of his friends but he knows they can never have a relationship. This is because Jake suffered a certain injury during the war and Brett is never satisfied and quickly discards men anyway. The book sums up the entire relationship in the last few lines when Brett states "We could have had such a damned good time together." and Jakes replies "Isn't it pretty to think so?"What I enjoy most about this book is the extreme detail that Hemingway provides in his description of settings and scenery. You have a sense of reading someone's travel journal. This is in direct contrast to his approach with dialogue, however. Here, he is very precise and minimalistic. Character interactions become almost stilted and robotic. However, the characters are "tight" most of the time and the writing mimics a stuporous dialect. This leads me to the one element that always takes me by surprise; the vast quantity of alcohol consumed by the characters. As they travel between cafes, restaurants and bars in the course of an evening, it's not uncommon for each to have drunk 3 or more bottles of wine and numerous cocktails; mainly whiskey and absinthe.If you've ever dreamed of dropping everything and leisurely traveling the world or are interested in fishing, boxing or bullfighting, then you'll enjoy this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Good story of "Lost Generation" literary types in Paris who decide to go to Pamplona in the 1920's to see the bullfights. Four men revolve around Lady Brett Ashley, an English flapper who's also a drunkard and divorcee - they're all in love with her. Pity, Jake, the narrator of the story loves her too, but cannot act on it due to a war injury that has left him impotent. In love with him herself, she and Jake can only wish and reflect on how pretty it would be to have a life together. He watches from the sidelines as she goes from one man to another, drinking her way through them, trying to forget the fact the man she met during the war and fell in love with can never make love to her. A slice of life amidst the dissolute and drunk set, whiling their lives away hoping for something of which they don't know what.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I've seen some bad reviews of this book, and that just blows me away, because I find Hemingway's first big novel to be a brilliant ride that perfectly evokes the vibe and angst of the Lost Generation. It literally takes you for as trip along with a group of American and English expats as they journey from 1902s Paris to the gritty and brutal bullfights in Spain. The romantic side of the story features the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley, who Jake Barnes is hopelessly besotted with. As a reader you can easily become immersed in Hemingway's distinctly vivid descriptions of both the romantic locales and violent bullfights, and with the characters' disillusionment, moral bankruptcy and unrequited love. It's got tragedy, romance and locations to die for--and language that lingers in your mind.Hemingway's pacing allows for you to really soak everything in, and forces you to pay attention to his beautiful prose. If a reader is used to speed reading and doesn't have a true appreciation for the language, they will find the book too slow. For those who really appreciate classic literature, you will find the prose stylish, detailed and beautiful. The characters are vibrant, charismatic and quirky, and it's amazing to see how they lived life to the fullest and indulged in debauchery so far back in the day.This book will inspire you to travel, specifically to Spain!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The novel is set in post-WWI Europe, and the characters are American expatriates living in France and drinking to exist, except for Jake Barnes who is the hero of the novel; he is the only character that isn't drunk for the story's entirety. Jake is able to stare into the meaninglessness of the modern world and find some hope in it. Jake's penis was shot off in the war. His balls and testicles remained intact, so is was still capable of being aroused, but unable to consumate his love with Brett, the love of his life. Because he cannot satisfy her sexually, he makes the ultimate sacrifice out of love: he allows Brett to sleep with other men. He watches her satisfy her physical, animal desire with men she does not really love. It is the most painfully romantic book I have ever read. It's a novel about being authentic.In the years directly following WWI, Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway, "You are all a lost generation." Hemingway wrote the novel in response to Stein's insensitive ignorance. He placed Stein's quote at the front of the book, and used this quote from Ecclesiastes to respond to it:One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever...The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose...The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits...All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.Existentialism says we have to live our lives as though they are ends in themselves. If you want to live a good life and be an 'authentic' good person, you have to do it because it's good, because you want to, not because it may get you into Heaven. The question, then, arises about whether or not good morals can exist in a Godless world. Whether people can do things for their own sake. In the novel, most of the characters drink all of the time because the world is meaningless and it doesn't matter what they do; they don't realize they have a responsibility to live a good life.Hemingway uses bull-fighting as a metaphor for this authenticity. Good bull fighters will do it for its own sake, not as a performance for someone else. The descriptions of the bull fights are so beautiful; I hope to see a bull fight in Spain, one day. I leave you with this:Romero's left hand dropped the muleta over the bull's muzzle to blind him, his left shoulder went forward between the horns as the sword went in, and for just an instant he and the bull were one, Romero way out over the bull, the right arm extended high up to where the hilt of the sword had gone in between the bull's shoulders.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a good book, and although it is not my style, it was a pretty easy read. This book follows Jake, an American author living in France after the first world war. Jake and his friends are part of 'the lost generation' and it seems as though they are searching for meaning and purpose in life. In this aspect I felt that the book had no meaning or purpose which I think was the point. I felt it difficult to relate to the characters, Brett the romantic interest in the book was very difficult to understand in today's world. She was Married, getting a divorce and getting remarried to another Man all the while stringing along Jake, the narrator, who was in love with her and she seemed to also love him. I think Brett did not want to settle down, and liked male attention, as well as marrying for social position, which I think was the way it was then. At this time marrying for love was not a common practice. So Brett had many flings that Jake and her husband to be knew about, and I believe Jake understood that they would never be together, even though both of them liked to think about it. This book left me feeling melancholy.I think this is an important book to have read, and it gives some very interesting insight into our past and 'the lost generation' post WWI. If you are going to read this book, I suggest brushing up on history post WWI and maybe even some France and Spain geography
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Overall, I enjoyed the book, it was slow paced, but that was both a good and bad thing for me. Again, Hemingway is a great story teller even with a slow paced book the reader can easily get themselves lost in how he tells the story. This one of course is no exception, as it follows a cast of characters, in the post-world-war-I era and their travels to Spain. He also brings his favourite past times into this story, I wonder if some of the issues the characters went through in this book, are a bit of an imprint of how he felt after the war? Does this book have some similarities to his own personal experiences?I think the inner demons of some of the characters were portrayed well; the all had complex problems, pasts and histories, almost too complex for a book that is so short. I understand where Hemingnway was coming from, and what he was trying to accomplish, but it was almost too much at times for such a short book. One of my main issues with the book, the second was, I didn’t really like any of the characters, they weren’t bad people, but for me they were just there, and happen to be a group of people with a lot of history and issues.The rest of the book was well done; Hemingway brings to life pleasures like fishing, and bullfighting to life. He really makes the reader engaged in these aspects of the story. I’m not a fan of bull fighting, nor agree with it, but Hemingway did do a fantastic job at brining the event to life, as well as the love and passion those who attend the event have for it. Even fishing, something almost trivial is described in an interesting matter. I wouldn’t normally enjoy a book, focusing on paragraph after paragraph of fishing, but Hemingway seems to be able to bring some magic to it.Overall, it was well done. Slow paced book, but a good choice for a casual read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This has always been one of my favorite books. I first read it when I was in high school and I started being interested in Paris in the twenties. Prior to that I had spent hours sitting on the floor in my father's kitchen looking at the pictures in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or maybe they were in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (we had both). I liked those pictures because of the funny hats and cool cars and because Ms. Stein and Ms. Toklas had standard poodles and I also had a standard poodle. In any event, all of this eventually sparked an interest in The Lost Generation and I read all kinds of things that weren't assigned by my various (dreadful) honors English teachers - lots of novels, some poetry, a fair amount of biography and non-fiction.During earlier reads of this book I liked most the romance of it - the running of the bulls, the bistros and cafes, and Jake and Brett's doomed romance. I remember liking the idea of Brett, too, sort of adventurous and tragic in her own way. The writing was also excellent - so simple and so evocative.At this point in my life I still love this book, although this time I was most attracted to Hemingway's descriptions of journeying through the countryside - sitting on top of the bus, walking in Spain, fishing, the sights and sounds of San Fermin. I liked Brett a lot less and found their romantic problems somewhat less compelling (there are so many more options for expressing sexuality than either Jake or Brett allowed for). It's interesting how books change as you do.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Bukowski once wrote (and I cannot remember exactly where) that he picked up a novel one day and read a scene in which two lovers tried to make love, and then the man would get up and pour a drink, only to repeat the offense unsuccessfully a few more times. He remarked at how fascinating it was that 'some' author had found something that 'nobody' wrote about. His praise continued for a few short lines before remarking that later he found out that the man had his dick blown off in the war, and Bukowski lost interest. This book is without a doubt one of the finest pieces of raw literature that I've ever read and requires no further praise from me in order to be validated. For any fan of books, or words in general, this is certainly a nice collection of them.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In my view, Hemingway's best novel. His simple, clean writing style belie the depth with which he equips his characters. The book's narrative perspective is so focused and delightfully insular -- just as you would expect a story told by a single person to be. For me, the fun of reading Hemingway is thinking about what he leaves out of the text. Why does he provide so much detail about some things, and none about others? The first time I read Hemingway I confess I didn't "get" what people were so enamored with. But I was blessed to havea high school teacher who patiently explained to us what was so unique about the writing, and that added vividly to my appreciation of the author. I am very thankful for that perspective so I can enjoy this book so much. I am not as eloquent as some of the other reviewers on this page -- I suggest you check out ellenq's review to get a more complete picture. But give this one a try, and just take time every once in a while to appreciate the sound of the words and the simplicity and clarity of the book, especially its dialogue.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sexist or not, Hemingway penned a winner here. I think the story is not by any means a perfect novel, but the experiences of the characters made me envious and the representation of human nature as less than ideal is subtly poignant in a way that only Hemingway can pull off. Read between the lines and think about what is not being said, that's the best way to read Hemingway because he does leave so much up to the reader for interpretation.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Direct style with powerful simple phrasing. The justaposition of Jake, whwho has a war injury to the groin, and Lady Brett Ashley is full of anguish and unresolved love.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I reread this recently and enjoyed it, though not as much as when I read it in high school. The clean sentences still appealed to me, though I found the way Jake's wound was not directly mentioned to be, well, dare I say gimmicky?Almost directly after I finished, I had the great fortune to stumble upon Joyce Carol Oates's novella, "Papa at Ketchum" a fiction of Hemingway's last days. It was kind of an amazing pairing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The first Hemingway novel I've read in a very long time, and it totally redeemed the writer for me. The episodic story of Jake Barnes and Lady Ashley, together with their friends was much more than their drunken sprees, fishing in the Pyrennes, and the bulls running in Pamplona. This time the language absolutely caught me up in the atmosphere and time period between two world wars.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    In a world lush with suffering and violence, Hemingway provides a look into the happenings of the immigrant bourgeois in Paris. With no want of money or wealth, the upper crust of the society stand away from the teeming masses rather than aiding the yearning populous with not so much as an ounce of philanthropy or any indication thereof.Rather, the emigrated American socialites prefer opulence and wanton luxury to so much as lifting a finger in any form of work. Enveloped and encapsulated in the grasp of society's frivolities, the characters of Hemingway's narrative spend and spend and spend for the empty revelries of their aloof and unconcerned existence.Masterfully written in Hemingway's nearly overbearing descriptive style, Hemingway flourishes his pen and finishes a masterpiece. Although undoubtedly well-deserving literary acclaim, the characters' complete and utter superfluousness about life in general put their despicable nonchalance ahead of Hemingway's eloquence and merited this book no higher a rating than a meager 2.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I don't know where to start with this review, I simply loved all of it. I haven't read any Hemingway for a while so perhaps the most important thing was the simple, spare beauty of the prose. There is just no effort involved in reading this book, although the impressions it leaves behind have provided me with more food for thought than most writers manage to engender in a career. I was left practically smelling the dusty plazas of Spain and considering how we depend on others for our view of ourselves. A stunning book, and hard to believe that it was his debut novel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A powerful description of the Lost Generation that aptly resonates in modern ears. Various topics of importance are discussed like the irreparable damage of war, how to hold your liquor and cultural differences between the Spanish and the French. Is both very sad and very funny simultaneously with the leitmotif properly expressed by Voltaire long ago "O che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Understanding much of the emotional power and observations of the novel seems likely to require knowledge/experiance of historical situation
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very interesting, if you can get through it. Very dry, but there's a lot of depth in the pages. A condensed exposition of the Modernist literary movement of the 1920s.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Although Hemingway is unquestionably a master at evoking much with very concise prose, I found this book annoying. The characters and unlikeable--alcoholic, wayward, misdirected, cruel. Also, I cannot be moved by the "art" of bullfighting, a inhumane tradition. I recognize the brilliance in some of the prose and the dialogue, but I also end up feeling as if Hemingway is over-rated.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Well written but ultimately really weird--Hemingway and his characters tied up in all sorts of repressed knots.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is my favorite book ever.It's a story of alcoholism and manipulation due to utter confusion on the part of the antagonist. She has no idea what she wants out of her life, and the book unfolds as a result.This book is also very funny if you have any appreciation for dry humor.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I decided to take a stab at reading this classic because so many people on Eurotrek listed it as their favorite travel book of all time. And as a travel book, it's a good read. Ernest Hemingway's adjective-free but strangely descriptive writing style painted vivid pictures of interwar Paris, Spanish fiestas and tiny villages in the countryside. Unfortunately, the characters didn't come through nearly as vividly as the places they visited. We do get a couple glimpses of the narrator's night time contemplations -- "it is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the day time, but at night it is another thing" and "I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in [the world]. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned what it was all about" -- but these are few and far between. I found the other characters difficult to penetrate.And here's the part that will make the God of Literature smite me: I thought the plot could have been an episode of Dawson's Creek. I shall summarize. Brett, the main love interest, is a ho'. She is in a non-exclusive long-distance relationship, which is really just an excuse to hook up with as many people as she wants while hanging onto the guy in Scotland with all the money. Because Brett is a drama queen in addition to being a ho, she invites herself to a fiesta with a party that includes her fiance, a guy she banged and a guy she's leading on. Not even the presence of her fiance is enough to make Brett mend her ho-ish ways, so soon she runs away with a bullfighter. Various men punch each other, drink heavily, cry alone at night, gnash their teeth and rend their garments with despair. As near as I can figure out, Brett's chief characteristics are large bosoms and emphasizing strange words in her sentences: "I say, do give a chap a cigarette." I am unclear on why she was worth so much trouble to all these men - as I understand it, Paris of the 1920s was overflowing with similar ho's.I guess Hemingway wrote this as a sort of wake-up call to his generation, like "look how morally bankrupt and superficial you are" but at best, I found its relevance limited today. Maybe this book was special when it was published, but I honestly don't know that it deserves to be called a classic.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A strange and gripping story. Actually the lives of these young people are quite crappy. Most of them have been torn out of the usual grid of understanding, and what they do is basicly sitting around drinking and talking rubbish. But this is really a vision of freedom that is deeply disturbing. Only by being torn out of the grid can we have this freedom, and not having experienced it feels like a great loss. Like all visions it is of course a never never land. It's not a place where we can actually live, but it's a place where our souls belong.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Yes, Hemingway is a great writer, but this book didn't do much for me other than make me dislike the characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Hemingway writes of PAris and Pamplona during the running of the bull in the 1920's. It is told through the experiences of a group of American and English expatriates.

Book preview

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

INTRODUCTION

The Sun Also Rises came out of raw, tentative experience and clear, close observation. In March 1922, four years before the novel was published, Ernest Hemingway wrote an article on American bohemians in Paris for the Toronto Star Weekly that began: The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde. In his novel, he would allow some of these people to travel south.

In November 1923, when Hemingway went trout-fishing in Germany, he used some of the atmosphere of that trip in his novel when his protagonist Jake Barnes, who is tired of Paris, and an American friend go trout-fishing in the Basque country. With rucksack and fly-rods, he wrote in another article for the Toronto Star Weekly, we hiked across country, sticking to the high ridges and the rolling crests of the hills, sometimes through deep pine timber, sometimes coming out into a clearing and farmyards and again going, for miles, without seeing a soul.

A month earlier, for the same newspaper, Hemingway described the bullfighting and the festivities in Pamplona: All night long the wild music kept up in the street below. Several times in the night there was a wild roll of drumming, and I got out of bed and across the tiled floor to the balcony. But it was always the same. Men, blue-shirted, bareheaded, whirling and floating in a wild fantastic dance down the street behind the rolling drums and shrill fifes.

He emphasized the sexual allure of the bullfighters. You cannot compete with bull fighters on their own ground. If anywhere. The only way most husbands are able to keep any drag with their wives at all is that, first there are only a limited number of bull fighters, second there are only a limited number of wives who have ever seen bull fights.

As Hemingway began The Sun Also Rises, he was excited by Pamplona as though it were fresh news. Hemingway kept notes on the art of bullfighting during his first journey to Spain in 1923. Bullfighting was, he wrote, the only popular amusement on which it is impossible to bet; it was an art not an amusement. He was determined that he was not going to apologize for bull fighting. It was, he noted, a tragedy—not a sport. Have only seen 16—hope to see 300 more before I die. Only thing that brings man opposit[e]s of life and death.

As he imagined his first novel, Hemingway also had a fresh style to work with, apparent in his journalism and in his early stories. In this style, the emotion lived between the lines, buried within the cadences and the rhythms of the sentences.

In order to write a plain sentence, Hemingway had to feel the emotion and then not parade what he felt, or wear it on his sleeve. Instead, he found a way of enticing feeling from the depths, as a fisherman might, or luring it toward him, as a matador might, and then allowing it to evade easy capture, giving it strength and subtlety.

Sometimes Hemingway wrote like Cézanne painted. In a deleted passage in his story Big Two-Hearted River, he wrote of an alter ego: Cézanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It was hell to do. . . . He . . . wanted to write about country so that it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting. . . . He felt almost holy about it.

In his memoir of his early years in Paris, A Moveable Feast, posthumously published, Hemingway also wrote about the power the French painter had over him as he learned his trade: I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions I was trying to put into them. I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret.

The secret lay in the brushstrokes of Cézanne, each one open and obvious in its textures, with repetitions and subtle variations, each one containing something close to emotion, but emotion deeply controlled. Each stroke sought to pull the eye in and hold it, and yet also build to a larger design in which there was a richness and density, but also much that was mysterious and hidden. This is what Hemingway sought to do with his sentences.

By looking at the work of Cézanne first in Chicago, as he did, then in the museums in Paris and in the home of his friend Gertrude Stein, he sought to make the sentences and the paragraphs he wrote ostensibly simple, filled with repetitions and odd variations, charged with a sort of hidden electricity that seemed to live in the space between the words.

The Sun Also Rises dramatizes and transforms a real trip that Hemingway and his wife Hadley made to Spain with Englishspeaking friends in the summer of 1925. Among them was Lady Duff Twysden, twice married, who came with her partner Pat Guthrie, who specialized in running up bad debts. Harold Loeb, with whom Duff had just spent a weekend at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, followed her to Pamplona. Harold had a genius for . . . making a fool of himself, Hadley later said.

Hemingway enjoyed Duff’s company, often seeing her alone in Paris at night, much to his wife’s distress. In Pamplona, while Hadley went to bed early, her husband and Duff and the others continued drinking. Ernest and I had not started to fall apart at that time, she said. But everyone was drinking all the time, and everybody was having affairs all the time.

At Pamplona that summer, a young matador took a shine to Hadley and presented her with a treasured token, the ear of a bull he had just killed in the ring. She wrapped it in a handkerchief and carried it with her. In Madrid, another matador let her hold his heavy red cape.

What is fascinating is how quickly Hemingway began to turn this trip into fiction. Immediately after Pamplona, he and Hadley made for Madrid and soon they moved to Valencia. As he told George Plimpton, he began the book there on his birthday, July 21, 1925.

At the beginning, he used the real names of those who had been with him in Pamplona, even calling himself Hem. As he worked, he gradually changed the names, although it took a while for Duff to become Lady Brett Ashley. The bullfighter was eventually called Pedro Romero, a famed matador of the late eighteenth century. Hemingway decided to erase the presence of his wife Hadley completely and change the name of his narrator to Jake.

Like Hemingway, Jake would be a newspaperman and a war veteran. Unlike Hemingway, Jake really knew about bullfighting, spoke fluent Spanish and lived alone.

The struggle was whom to place at the center of the book, who the hero would be. In an interjection in the narrative written in August 1925 and later deleted, Jake Barnes himself pondered his own role: It looked as though I were trying to get to be the hero of this story. But that is all wrong. Gerald [later Robert] Cohn is the hero. When I bring myself in it is only to clear up something. Or maybe Duff is the hero. Or Niño de la Palma [the name of the matador, later to be Pedro Romero]. He never really had a chance to be the hero. Or maybe there is not any hero at all. Maybe a story is better off without any hero.

The power of the novel comes partly from what it leaves out. Although the characters live in the aftermath of a war in which many of them have served, we barely hear about what they saw or suffered. They have consigned it to silence. Jake is not described physically, nor are many of the other characters, and this means that the act of reading the book is an intense act of imagining, filling in gaps.

There is only one significant moment when we catch a glimpse of Jake’s earlier American life. When he has been punched by Cohn in Pamplona, he is reminded of when he was kicked in the head in a football game and I walked up the street from the station in the town I had lived in all my life and it was all new. . . . It was all strange.

It is even stranger now because we are not told anything of Jake’s background. No parents or siblings. No American adolescence. No college life. This absence of backstory offers an intensity to the present moment in the novel. Each scene is concrete and immediate. Jake keeps a fierce control not only on what happens but on the account he gives. His tone as narrator is clipped and businesslike, with no dreamy textures or effort to surmise or sum up, and no flourishes.

The simplicity of the prose is a way of coiling emotion and expression so that they can be all the more effectively released. When Brett appears, she is described in a simple sentence: Brett was damned good-looking. Later, Pedro Romero will be described: He was the best-looking boy I have ever seen. These two sentences are not vague and suggestive. They are precise, exact, but also casual, not striving for effect. Jake, as narrator, is to be taken at his word. He has been through too much to be bothered becoming an unreliable narrator or an old-fashioned stylist.

In an interview with George Plimpton, Hemingway said: I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.

As a man without history, Jake is also a man with few qualities beyond an ability to meet deadlines, feel loyalty toward his friends and possess a real knowledge of Spain. He is at ease when he is alone. Only a few times does his bitterness emerge. When it becomes clear that Cohn and Brett have been together, he feels jealousy and feels hate, but he does not entertain those feelings. He briefly registers them and moves on.

After Cohn has punched him, Jake goes back to his room and thinks about his assailant, who was so sure that Brett loved him. He was going to stay, and true love would conquer all. This is that sort of platitude that most repels Jake. It is no accident that he follows it with: Some one knocked on the door. He wants to return as quickly as he can to the tangible, knowable world.

Later, when what he has done in Pamplona is brought home to him by a telegram from Brett, he sums it up in short, staccato sentences, and ends with I went in and had lunch, needing to say something factual and true to avoid untested and unmanageable thoughts and memories.

Hemingway, in his vivid descriptions of what actually happens in a bullfight, uses all his skills as a close observer. He does not add color to the actions, and he does not attempt to wrest easy symbolic meaning from them. He knows how much not to say. Some of the writing reads like reportage. He leaves it like that so that the resonance can come subtly by implication.

He is careful, for example, not to connect the violence in the bull ring to the violence of the war. Nor does he connect the sense of the primitive power of bullfighting to the paler power of the Catholic Church, to which Jake is loyal. But, on the other hand, he is content to explore the sexual power of the ritual and to move this drama to the center of the novel.

But there is another competing story. It is the story of Jake’s fall from grace. It has been carefully established that Jake knows about bulls. Montoya, who owns the hotel, recognizes this in him and respects him. Unlike all the other expatriates, Jake is an insider, a man proud of his own knowledge. Slowly, as he leads his friends through a complex maze, his friends begin to let him down. This is witnessed by Montoya, who comes into the hotel restaurant to find that Pedro Romero, who should maintain his distance from outsiders, is consorting with a bunch of louche foreigners: He started to smile at me, then he saw Pedro Romero with a big glass of cognac in his hand, sitting laughing between me and a woman with bare shoulders, at a table full of drunks. He did not even nod.

Later, when Jake passes Montoya on the stairs, he bowed and did not smile. At the end, Montoya sends one of the maids with the bill. He does not appear himself. It is clear that Jake has lost Pamplona, that his role as insider has dissolved. He can no longer be trusted to pay homage to the elaborate set of rules he himself has learned with such care. That is what the fiesta has done for him. It hardly matters to his friends, but Jake has lost the one place that he seemed to control. All he has now is language, a plain style with an astonishing undercurrent.

In 1972, when I was seventeen, I found a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, a seaside resort in County Waterford in the southeast of Ireland. Often, since we were very busy at night, I had the afternoons off.

I had packed one book with me and took this to the beach. It was a Penguin paperback, The Essential Hemingway. It had a photograph on the jacket of a bearded man who looked wise and skeptical and handsome in a weathered sort of way. It included short stories and extracts and the entire text of The Sun Also Rises.

That novel seemed to bypass my intelligence and move straight to my nervous system. It was like energy. I had nothing in common with any of the people in the book. I had never been to Paris or to Spain. I had never seen a bullfight or been fishing. Actually, I had never even been outside Ireland. I did not know any Americans, or any English people. I had never been drunk. I knew nothing much about sex.

And yet the book overwhelmed me. It opened a world that seemed all the more complete for being utterly unfamiliar. The idea that Jake did not feel the need to register his background, or remember his childhood, or write home to his family, was both shocking and thrilling. It felt like liberation that summer on that beach.

Three years later I went to Spain and began an association with Catalonia that has lasted almost half a century. Although I had no interest in bullfights, I did experience much of the Spain described in The Sun Also Rises—the drinking, the sexual adventures, the traditional world of festival and ritual slowly becoming open to the outside world.

But something else that I took from the book was even more important when I came to write my first novel, The South. Like many other novelists, I found Hemingway’s style, his way of constructing character, his way of leaving out adjectives, adverbs and elaborate descriptions, his skill at suggesting emotion rather than spelling it out, not only helpful but fundamental.

On those afternoons in Tramore, under the pale Irish sun, the novel itself took me over. It gave me one of those rare, rich reading experiences that derived from the smart dialogue and the short sentences, but also from the sense of urgency and immediacy and vitality in the narrative. What happened to Jake Barnes in Pamplona that summer was memorable and fascinating because of how eager he was to disguise his own vulnerability, to pretend it was all nothing, until what he had lost came to overwhelm him. Out of simplicity— simple sentences, simple emotions—Hemingway constructed a drama with the most complex implications and undercurrents. In doing so, he changed the way fiction is written and read.

—Colm Tóibín

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of him.

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife; and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter. As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.

The divorce was arranged and Robert Cohn went out to the Coast. In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By that time Cohn, who had been regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor. It was his money and he discovered he liked the authority of editing. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he had to give it up.

By that time, though, he had other things to worry about. He had been taken in hand by a lady who hoped to rise with the magazine. She was very forceful, and Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand. Also he was sure that he loved her. When this lady saw that the magazine was not going to rise, she became a little disgusted with Cohn and decided that she might as well get what there was to get while there was still something available, so she urged that they go to Europe, where Cohn could write. They came to Europe, where the lady had been educated, and stayed three years. During these three years, the first spent in travel, the last two in Paris, Robert Cohn had two friends, Braddocks and myself. Braddocks was his literary friend. I was his tennis friend.

The lady who had him, her name was Frances, found toward the end of the second year that her looks were going, and her attitude toward Robert changed from one of careless possession and exploitation to the absolute determination that he should marry her. During this time Robert’s mother had settled an allowance on him, about three hundred dollars a month. During two years and a half I do not believe that

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