From the Bookshelf of The Importance of Reading Ernest…

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

Start date: May 1, 2010

Finish date: June 1, 2010

Discussion: The Sun Also Rises

Discussion leader: Brad

Why we're reading this: Our first ever novel length book club choice. Join our discussion and help make it a great one.
[close] Our first ever novel length book club choice. Join our discussion and help make it a great one.

Find A Copy At

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 6 topics — 84 comments total

The Sun Also Rises

* First Impressions *no spoilers*
By Brad · 6 posts · 98 views

last updated Sep 10, 2013 09:44PM

Jake Barnes *spoilers*
By Brad · 21 posts · 408 views

last updated Jun 10, 2018 01:35PM

showing 1 of 1 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Jun 19, 2011 David Lentz rated it liked it

Let me begin by saying that I hold Hemingway in high esteem: so much so that while at the Key West Literary Seminar this year I visited his home for a second time. I have read nearly all of his novels and admire his devotion to writing insofar as he lived humbly in Paris among the Lost Generation to establish himself as a novelist. He paid his existential and literary dues as a novelist and was richly rewarded for his gifts. "The Sun Also Rises" is an early work and, although one can see his pro Let me begin by saying that I hold Hemingway in high esteem: so much so that while at the Key West Literary Seminar this year I visited his home for a second time. I have read nearly all of his novels and admire his devotion to writing insofar as he lived humbly in Paris among the Lost Generation to establish himself as a novelist. He paid his existential and literary dues as a novelist and was richly rewarded for his gifts. "The Sun Also Rises" is an early work and, although one can see his promise as a novelist, this particular novel suffers from a green, immature style, which is often the case of early novels. The book is taken from Hemingway's experiences in Paris on the Left Bank, the fiestas of Pamplona during the running of the bulls and fishing for trout in the mountains of Northern Spain. Despite the relative immaturity of his style he was an innovator: he was one of the early novelists to write dialogue with a truly sensitive ear attuned toward the ways in which ordinary people spoke to each other. He was committed to creating verisimilitude in dialogue and dialect. The characters cover themselves in their conversations with the slang of the day: "Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, (sic) you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship...The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on." One claim he makes, the truth of which may not be denied, is that we certainly pay for the things that we do: "You paid some way for everything that was any good." So Hemingway produces a literary style for dialogue that is so readily played out in the novelists who follow him and becomes so advanced in its execution by them that a work like "The Sun Also Rises" almost seems a parody in many places. It must be one of the most quoted works in the Good Bad Hemingway Contest held annually which both praises and parodies his novels. He writes in criticism of another writer that "He's through... He's written about all the things he knows, and now he's on all the things he doesn't know." Hemingway always wrote about the things that he knew from first-hand experience: war, fishing, writing, Cuba, Key West, the UP of Michigan, Paris, safari and women. Hem was a man of half as many wives as Henry VIII. Although he knew many women intimately, he didn't really understand them fully. I find that in many places Hemingway's women, even Lady Brett Ashley, play over and over again primarily as helpless objects of desire. In this book like most of his other characters Brett is a flat character and a stereotype for women of his era. I also found that other minorities (Jews, Afro-Americans) seem diminished in his work except for bull fighters and fishermen, essentially they are servants to a greater or lesser extent. Later in the "Old Man and the Sea" clearly this is not the case but it is true here in this book. He still has not yet really developed the sense of humanity which would emerge later to earn him a Nobel Prize for Literature. The male characters also seem flat with the Jewish boxer, Robert Cohn, and his hedonistic friends, Bill and the drunken Michael. He draws the bullfighter, Romero, a Spanish Romeo quite elegantly because he imbues in this character the deep respect Hemingway had for the courageous bullfighters and also portrays the bulls themselves as heroic, magnificent forces of nature, downstream like the great marlin, doomed by man's tragic desire to conquer and kill them for sport or sustenance as God similarly may play with mankind. Jake Barnes is a well drawn figure because he is Hemingway. It's as if Hemingway created Robert Cohn to be himself like a boxer, and Mike like the big drinker and the Hemingway women as the objects of desire that he sought. The book is poorly edited: I know, sorry, not withstanding Maxwell Perkins this is heresy but I stand by my claim. The stories about the fiesta at Pamplona and running of the bulls and the trout fishing and Brett with Romero weave a compelling tale worth reading. His writing about bull fighting and fishing attest to his fascination with both sports and elsewhere in hunting on safari. Then there is, of course, the elegant innuendo of the unfortunate war wound, one of the great scars of life for a man devoted to total immersion in his existential experience: none of us go through life without scars and a few may become immortal but rarely do we come out alive in the end. By all means read Hemingway but perhaps not this novel. Read the immortal works of Hemingway in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Torrents of Spring" and even "Across the River and into the Trees" which impress me more as the Nobel Prize winner rather than the green, American newspaperman in Paris of the Lost Generation. Hemingway is an iconic American author whose simplicity of style and power in telling a story earned him vast wealth and reverence as a writer during and after his lifetime: what novelist worth his salt wouldn't want to come back in the next life as Hem?
...more

32 likes · Like · see review

Apr 02, 2011 Carles Fabrego-Vinyeta rated it it was ok · review of another edition

El llibre explica com una grup de joves periodistes i escriptors viatgen de Paris a Pamplona per viure els San Fermins. Es nota que Hemingway coneixia bé la ciutat y la festa perquè la novel.la transmet molt agradablement la ciutat, l' ambient, la multitud desenfrenada, les borratxeres, els encierros i molt especialment les corrides de toros a la plaça, de les quals era un apassionat i gran coneixedor. Hemingway fa avançar la novel.la sobretot a través del diàleg. És a través del diàleg que cone ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Feb 25, 2012 Ross Cohen added it

The characters grew somewhat tiresome by the end, but that's the point. Jake's last line, "Yes [...] Isn't it pretty to think so?" confirms his realization that the lives followed throughout "The Sun Also Rises" are anything but ideal. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Apr 20, 2011 Ke rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-library-novels, 1001-books-you-must-read

Interesting lifestyle. It made me wonder if the current wave of Europeans and Americans moving to Asia are the counterpart for the lost generation. Where are their masterpieces?

The language was simple, yet beautiful. I love how Hemingway translated the French and the Spanish dialogue.

It felt too short though. And the beaded glasses were a bit overwrought. Maybe some readers will find this novel anti-Semitic, but maybe I don't know enough to talk about it. ...more

Like · see review

Apr 18, 2011 Aaron rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

This is one of the greatest works of fiction ever written and I did not realize just how wonderful a novel it was until I read it the second, maybe even the third time. Hemingway was an amazing writer. I don't feel that I can do it justice by trying to give a critique of it. If you read it and didn't like it, read it again. ...more

Like · see review