The Sun Also Rises in Reading the Classics

Jun 29, 2012 tara bomp rated it did not like it

Shelves: fiction, american, gave-up-on

I don't understand this. At all. I did not like a single aspect of this book. It's racist, misogynist, anti-semitic crap. Some discussion of all that stuff follows.

I finally gave up when he mentioned a "[n word] drummer" who had 4 words of dialogue, all of which were written in some kind of absurd parody of African-American dialect, which, added to his racist description of Cohn (constant references to his Jewishness as a bad thing and all his bad features owing to him being a Jew) I found unbea I don't understand this. At all. I did not like a single aspect of this book. It's racist, misogynist, anti-semitic crap. Some discussion of all that stuff follows.

I finally gave up when he mentioned a "[n word] drummer" who had 4 words of dialogue, all of which were written in some kind of absurd parody of African-American dialect, which, added to his racist description of Cohn (constant references to his Jewishness as a bad thing and all his bad features owing to him being a Jew) I found unbearable. The prose is boring - nothing is described much, which I enjoy, but instead they're merely named. Things pop in and out of the background. Locations feel no more than cardboard backgrounds. When he does describe, it's the most boring things - he describes the route a taxi takes through Paris just by listing names, depriving the route of any context or meaning.

I couldn't understand the characters at all. They're less characters, more very vaguely shaped names. I realise that 80 years and a huge economic gap separates me, but nothing these people do seem real. They eat every meal at an expensive restaraunt. Money is never an issue, even though there seems to be no reason for them to have so much. They drink constantly, so much that they should all need liver transplants. They drink while waiting to drink. Nothing they say has any meaning. The most dramatic section was Cohn's wife spending a page just insulting him and the reaction from the narrator was "wow, rude" and pretty much ignoring it, so it was again meaningless. Another time a supposed "friend" who's just suddenly introduced and says nothing at all of any interest attacks Cohn in the narrator's presence - with no provocation - Cohn actually speaks up, and the narrator says he's being funny. It's incoherent and feels completely ridiculous and unbelievable. Very little characterisation is given, but each time it feels contradicted by other things they do and the effect is heavily jarring.

Hemingway also has a frustrating habit of introducing characters as if they've been introduced before, by just mentioning their name. Each time makes me go back through the book just to check that I haven't missed something. I understand this approach, but each time it happens it feels like I *need* the context that I've lost out on by not knowing who this person is. It makes a few paragraphs confusing.

Then there are tiny issues that are still annoying. What kind of a lordship is "Ashley"? Lords are named after places, or at least they should be referred to by a surname. Ashley is a first name, and this actually confused me a few times. A taxi drops our narrator off at somewhere he didn't want to be and apparently the taxis ALWAYS do that in a certain case which is described specifically in a whole sentence. Why did the taxi do that? It didn't matter at all, apparently, because the right cafe was very close by. There's a section where they're about to pour some champagne, they say "wine would be more difficult to cool otherwise we'd have had that" and then the champagne is called wine for the rest of the section. These are all tiny faults, but they serve to completely frustrate any attempt on my part to even skim the book because they're so *pointless*.

Ultimately, it just felt like a book where very little happened to characters I don't care about and who barely exist, written in prose that didn't ever hold my interest. ...more

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Jan 14, 2013 Jerry rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Notes: I can't believe this novel is 87 years old. The older I become, the more relevant its themes. Strangely, the older I become, the more hungover I feel during the characters' stay in Pamplona. Mr. Barnes, I will see you in another few years. ...more

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