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3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
i’m so tired of french cafes oh my god
The reviews for this book are hilarious and other people have reviewed it better than me. Please see both https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/170100376 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1375127650
On one hand I hate how the dialogue moves at a hare's pace but doesn't say anything of substance. It's one of those emotionally charged, tension building stories but the payoff is just... kind of dumb? On the other hand, everyone will have plenty of opinions and guides on how to read Hemingway so it's not like I'm particularly itching for understanding. I think to truly appreciate it, you'll need to read it multiple times but life is too short for that.
This edition (penguin vitae), while beautiful, has an introduction that completely spoils the story and attempts to tell you how to read the book. Don't get it.
On one hand I hate how the dialogue moves at a hare's pace but doesn't say anything of substance. It's one of those emotionally charged, tension building stories but the payoff is just... kind of dumb? On the other hand, everyone will have plenty of opinions and guides on how to read Hemingway so it's not like I'm particularly itching for understanding. I think to truly appreciate it, you'll need to read it multiple times but life is too short for that.
This edition (penguin vitae), while beautiful, has an introduction that completely spoils the story and attempts to tell you how to read the book. Don't get it.
Reader, sometimes you can just call the kettle black. Look at it, point to it, say it, "It's black". Of course you'll be critiqued for it, "You're not seeing it, the kettle isn't simply black, it's vanta black. To just say it's 'black' is to not understand the kettle truly. See the shade? The absence of other colors? How it almost eats away at the light and space around it?"
The Sun Also Rises isn't really about the disillusionment of the "Lost Generation", it's just autofiction of rich ex pats drinking their way through Paris and then Pamplona. Jake Barnes occasionally has some good dialogue, and every now and then he'll say something really sobering, I remember how vividly taken aback I was when a date asked him if he was impotent and he responded with "I got hurt in the war." Rather than an oasis in a desert, that one line was a small patch of desert placed directly in the middle of a luscious paradise. It was rough, it was REAL. That one line, and the fishing trip, are the reasons why this worked it's way up to three stars.
I was sick about reading the detailed lists of everything the crew drank from place to place, some will say that it's a gateway to the materialism of the 1920's, oh fuck off. There are ways to make allusions to the idea without making it so mind numbingly boring. Hemingway based this book on his own lived experience, about a dysfunctional friend group bumming around Europe with alcohol and sex and matadors, and it came out so undeniably boring. He loved his hooch, so he lists off every single drink that was bought whenever they sit down at a café or bar in every single chapter. The man loved his bullfighting so a quarter of this novel is about bullfighting, people will try to tell you it means something, it does not, and that's okay.
It's shallow, and not because it's "Intended to be", it's shallow because IT IS SHALLOW. The characters "Don't feel anything" because "The Great War sapped all of the color out of life and times are tough", they don't feel anything because there's no emotion in this book. It wasn't cheekily left out of it, it just isn't there. If I'm too broke to pay for heating, and I lose said heating, you're not making me or yourself look any smarter by saying I'm saving on it.
Of course, reading it in 2023, you're thrown off by the causal racism and antisemitism, at least I hope you are. Oh, and Brett, just do me a favor and roll your eyes, I need that extra added effect. God forbid you're ugly in a Hemingway novel. I know it was "of the times" to have someone be both beautiful and broken so riveting, but it just doesn't hold as much weight now. "You don't get it man." Brett is the object of desire for every man in the book, she's also very much broken, the main character, who is also broken, is the only man who can never have her because of this. He understands her on a deeper level, so therefore it could never work. Hemingway was not the first to utilize this cliché, and history has proven he is far from the last.
But of course, the "Myth" of Hemingway matters more than the actual material, to say you've read Hemingway matters more than your actual opinion of it. It's why there's a 20 page foreword, and 100 pages of how this novel was formed at the end of it. Read it, take the free opinions given to you, and then bring them up in conversations that are vaguely about "life" and "nature" or whatever. Hemingway is not the end all be all of depth, which to a degree is present in this book.
The aforementioned Fishing Trip is a genuine moment, it is a moment that happens to each and every one of us. It might not be a fishing trip, but it's you, and a friend/relative you have an emotional connection to. It could be a road trip, a boat outing, a late night trip to McDonalds, we all have those perfectly lucid moments that hold a special place in our memory, even if we can't figure out why it matters. With moments like the Fishing Trip, the pretension falls away and we're given reality, unabashedly.
The Sun Also Rises wasn't my first Hemingway novel, and it won't be my last, but it was the one to reaffirm to me that you honestly don't really need to read all of the classics.
Fair is fair, so I will admit that I'm more harsh to books that are given such impossibly high, life changing praise. But do me a favor, dear reader, and I mean this genuinely, the next time someone tells you how Hemingway opened their eyes and how everyone needs to read his work, ask them how many books they've read in the last five years.
3/5. Time for the Sun to set.
LAST THREE REVIEWS:
The Dark Tide - Dennis McKiernan 2/5.
Mistborn: The Final Empire - Brandon Sanderson 2/5.
Elric of Melnibon - Michael Moorcock 4.5/5.
The Sun Also Rises isn't really about the disillusionment of the "Lost Generation", it's just autofiction of rich ex pats drinking their way through Paris and then Pamplona. Jake Barnes occasionally has some good dialogue, and every now and then he'll say something really sobering, I remember how vividly taken aback I was when a date asked him if he was impotent and he responded with "I got hurt in the war." Rather than an oasis in a desert, that one line was a small patch of desert placed directly in the middle of a luscious paradise. It was rough, it was REAL. That one line, and the fishing trip, are the reasons why this worked it's way up to three stars.
I was sick about reading the detailed lists of everything the crew drank from place to place, some will say that it's a gateway to the materialism of the 1920's, oh fuck off. There are ways to make allusions to the idea without making it so mind numbingly boring. Hemingway based this book on his own lived experience, about a dysfunctional friend group bumming around Europe with alcohol and sex and matadors, and it came out so undeniably boring. He loved his hooch, so he lists off every single drink that was bought whenever they sit down at a café or bar in every single chapter. The man loved his bullfighting so a quarter of this novel is about bullfighting, people will try to tell you it means something, it does not, and that's okay.
It's shallow, and not because it's "Intended to be", it's shallow because IT IS SHALLOW. The characters "Don't feel anything" because "The Great War sapped all of the color out of life and times are tough", they don't feel anything because there's no emotion in this book. It wasn't cheekily left out of it, it just isn't there. If I'm too broke to pay for heating, and I lose said heating, you're not making me or yourself look any smarter by saying I'm saving on it.
Of course, reading it in 2023, you're thrown off by the causal racism and antisemitism, at least I hope you are. Oh, and Brett, just do me a favor and roll your eyes, I need that extra added effect. God forbid you're ugly in a Hemingway novel. I know it was "of the times" to have someone be both beautiful and broken so riveting, but it just doesn't hold as much weight now. "You don't get it man." Brett is the object of desire for every man in the book, she's also very much broken, the main character, who is also broken, is the only man who can never have her because of this. He understands her on a deeper level, so therefore it could never work. Hemingway was not the first to utilize this cliché, and history has proven he is far from the last.
But of course, the "Myth" of Hemingway matters more than the actual material, to say you've read Hemingway matters more than your actual opinion of it. It's why there's a 20 page foreword, and 100 pages of how this novel was formed at the end of it. Read it, take the free opinions given to you, and then bring them up in conversations that are vaguely about "life" and "nature" or whatever. Hemingway is not the end all be all of depth, which to a degree is present in this book.
The aforementioned Fishing Trip is a genuine moment, it is a moment that happens to each and every one of us. It might not be a fishing trip, but it's you, and a friend/relative you have an emotional connection to. It could be a road trip, a boat outing, a late night trip to McDonalds, we all have those perfectly lucid moments that hold a special place in our memory, even if we can't figure out why it matters. With moments like the Fishing Trip, the pretension falls away and we're given reality, unabashedly.
The Sun Also Rises wasn't my first Hemingway novel, and it won't be my last, but it was the one to reaffirm to me that you honestly don't really need to read all of the classics.
Fair is fair, so I will admit that I'm more harsh to books that are given such impossibly high, life changing praise. But do me a favor, dear reader, and I mean this genuinely, the next time someone tells you how Hemingway opened their eyes and how everyone needs to read his work, ask them how many books they've read in the last five years.
3/5. Time for the Sun to set.
LAST THREE REVIEWS:
The Dark Tide - Dennis McKiernan 2/5.
Mistborn: The Final Empire - Brandon Sanderson 2/5.
Elric of Melnibon - Michael Moorcock 4.5/5.
The worst book I've ever read.
The sparse writing style allows the reader to fill in the blanks on what exactly the characters are feeling. I suppose, after the war, they're not feeling much of anything exactly, but join the club dude. In addition: the lack of plot, the over-repetitiveness of both dialog AND description (or what passes as description), the boring characters, the repetitive nature of their lives...it all amounts to nothing. I was hopeful that the last chapter or 2, which appears to loosen up the strict Minimalist Weiting Style for a few extra words would draw me in. It did not. The last chapter soon felt like a run on sentence. A journal of a drunk. Stream of consciousness that goes nowhere. Are all of these things bad? No. I've read and watched and can appreciate all of these things, both alone and together, but Hemingway does it poorly. How he was elevated to the level of a man's man is beyond me.
I can appreciate period novels, I like to see and understand the lingo and the time difference, and see everything there. This did not interest me. I've been a "i don't know what I'm doing with my life" mid 20s something. Perhaps this novel is meant to appeal to someone who can relate. Howecer, i've related to that, I'm through it, I don't care.
I hope to never encounter Hemingway again.
The sparse writing style allows the reader to fill in the blanks on what exactly the characters are feeling. I suppose, after the war, they're not feeling much of anything exactly, but join the club dude. In addition: the lack of plot, the over-repetitiveness of both dialog AND description (or what passes as description), the boring characters, the repetitive nature of their lives...it all amounts to nothing. I was hopeful that the last chapter or 2, which appears to loosen up the strict Minimalist Weiting Style for a few extra words would draw me in. It did not. The last chapter soon felt like a run on sentence. A journal of a drunk. Stream of consciousness that goes nowhere. Are all of these things bad? No. I've read and watched and can appreciate all of these things, both alone and together, but Hemingway does it poorly. How he was elevated to the level of a man's man is beyond me.
I can appreciate period novels, I like to see and understand the lingo and the time difference, and see everything there. This did not interest me. I've been a "i don't know what I'm doing with my life" mid 20s something. Perhaps this novel is meant to appeal to someone who can relate. Howecer, i've related to that, I'm through it, I don't care.
I hope to never encounter Hemingway again.
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Stylistically, Hemingway’s lean, straightforward prose proved to be somewhat of a challenge to someone who prefers her narratives with a little more flourish. (Fat is flavor, after all.) But I can appreciate strong neat lines when I see them. The Sun Also Rises is heavy on the dialogue and markedly spare with the imagery, yet the deliberate paucity of the latter device is precisely what lends this novel its cutting edge. (To be rather glib about it, you pay more attention to subtext after you’ve been bombarded by the seemingly inane.)
We follow a very select sample of the hapless and disillusioned “Lost Generation” as they flit from the glitz of Paris to the unforgiving heat of Spain, wrangling with post-war malaise all the while, and falling back onto dysfunctional caprice and learned helplessness. Bull-fighting here serves as the catch-all metaphor for the self-destruction and moral bankruptcy that so plagued a generation entrapped by the trauma of war—survivors turned anachronisms—as the world hurtled towards an era of decadence and prosperity.
The novel itself is largely based off of Hemingway’s experiences as an immigrant in post-WWI Europe and a later on de facto member of its population of expatriated artists (Fitzgerald and Faulkner being two other prominent figures among their ranks).
We follow a very select sample of the hapless and disillusioned “Lost Generation” as they flit from the glitz of Paris to the unforgiving heat of Spain, wrangling with post-war malaise all the while, and falling back onto dysfunctional caprice and learned helplessness. Bull-fighting here serves as the catch-all metaphor for the self-destruction and moral bankruptcy that so plagued a generation entrapped by the trauma of war—survivors turned anachronisms—as the world hurtled towards an era of decadence and prosperity.
The novel itself is largely based off of Hemingway’s experiences as an immigrant in post-WWI Europe and a later on de facto member of its population of expatriated artists (Fitzgerald and Faulkner being two other prominent figures among their ranks).
slow-paced
Well, something's gone rather amiss. Did I just...did I just read Hemingway and thoroughly enjoy it? Well, I never. Slowly dragging my feet into modern literature, I guess I must admit that not all sentences can go on for half-paragraphs, and sometimes that's OK.
I actually found the stacatto writing to be so spot-on to the story - a little biting, a little pretty, always stated as fact rather than ambling thoughts. Facts and action, presented through heart rather than mind. Apparently just the sort of stuff I was in the mood for.
I actually found the stacatto writing to be so spot-on to the story - a little biting, a little pretty, always stated as fact rather than ambling thoughts. Facts and action, presented through heart rather than mind. Apparently just the sort of stuff I was in the mood for.
Captures those lazy summer days in Spain perfectly. Read this in the hope of getting over my own unrequited love. It didn't do that but I still learned a lot.
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes