Book Review: The Sun Also Rises

© 1926 by Ernest Hemingway

Another book of which it is quite preposterous for me to label a post about it a “review.” I am but a flea compared to the conquering swaggering warlord that is the force of nature called Hemingway. However, I do quite non-preposterously consider myself widely read, so I’d like to share my opinion of one master’s debut novel I spent a week with.

In one sentence,

… I followed a bunch of insufferable drunks from Paris to Pamplona, with some bullfighting thrown in between tiresome drinking, fighting, and veiled sexual amorality.

In another,

… I didn’t enjoy the ride.

Oh, I can appreciate it. I very well did and do. I think the main problem with the novel was an expectation that something dramatic would happen. Something dramatic within the novel, such as someone getting killed at the end. And I had a good idea who it would be. But nothing of the sort happened.

Then I realized that something dramatic did happen. Something dramatic not within the novel, but about the novel itself.

It was Something New.

As anyone who’s ever read Hemingway in school knows, he revolutionized the way novels were written. In lieu of multitudinous, flowery, run-on, turgid, zig-zagging, stilted, embellished, ( … consults online thesaurus …), overly exegetic and ultra expository sentences, one atop the other, sentences upon sentences, page proportionate paragraphs, crescendo-ing to the highest heavens to tumble down thunderously to the foundations of the Niagara, The Sun Also Rises changed all that.

Changed all that. The book did. This book, now in my hands, late of the wooden shelf by the desk. This book changed all that. While drinking sherry, or jerez as the old Spaniards call it.

Hem’s revolution was much like, though more dramatic than, the chasm separating the previous two paragraphs.

Hemingway’s prose is sparse, functional, to-the-point. Long trains of interconnected prepositional phrases you might spot in the Conjunction Junction cartoon. And somehow the style amplifies the manly men and women who populate this tale. Everyone’s a drinker. Everyone boxes. Everyone fishes, or hunts, or steps in front of bulls, wants to step in front of bulls, or, if you’re a female Hemingway character, wants to seduce a bullfighter, in front of three or four other drunken boxing wanna-be bullfighters who’ve either bedded you, want to bed you, or can’t bed you due to a war injury.

So, while appreciative of what Hemingway did, overall I was disappointed. Am I a product of my time? Absolutely, unfortunately. But I can rise above it. I can dig good art when I see it, or read it. I wanna give The Sun Also Rises either a respectable solid-A or a disappointed C-minus. I’m not sure which. Maybe a mashed-up B / B-minus. Maybe if I drank more jerez I’d give it a B-plus.

Anyway, still planning on reading the other Hemingway I picked up a few weeks ago, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Might be a good exercise to do the ol’ high school compare / contrast essay, though that might also be a bit boring, unless I can come at it out of a field lefter than the one used for this “review”.

We’ll see …