45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Year Published: 1926
Pages: 198
First Sentence: Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:

Jake Barnes is a wounded man. He's doing his best not to let anyone see the torch he carries for Lady Brett Ashley, but also he sustained some sort of injury during the War that has left him lacking an important part of himself. It's not clear what the extent of this injury is, only that it seems to have left Jake impotent. That by itself is a personal tragedy on a scale I find hard to contemplate, and I am not being sarcastic.

Brett is easier to be sarcastic about. She's a modern woman. She's in the process of getting a divorce in order to marry a man named Michael, and meanwhile she's running around and having sex with different men. She likes to cuddle with Jake.

Jake and Brett are two of several characters who aimlessly travel from Paris to Pamplona for the running of the bulls before that became a tourist cliche, and moreso to watch the bullfights (fortunately for me, it's way less traumatizing to read about a bullfight than it is to watch one). They drink an astounding amount of alcohol over the course of their fiesta, to the point I am amazed that none of them were dead at the end of it. This is an instance where the plot is much less important than the execution.

I've ragged on Ernest Hemingway's style in the past, but I can't figure out how to articulate how perfectly he deployed the English language in The Sun Also Rises. A Farewell to Arms was just a little more stilted. For Whom the Bell Tolls, on the other hand, was so tedious that it took me almost two months to read back in 2008 (so, to be fair, I was completing the last year of my engineering degree at the time).

This drinking binge of a book found me at exactly the right moment, though. All those blank spaces Hemingway leaves between words are the ultimate instance of showing, not telling. He tells you nothing, and so you're left with all the pain that you can imagine, just like in the best horror films. It's not that I can relate to Jake Barnes, it's that there's room within his experience for my own. (And oh, the torches I've carried.)

My raving is mostly because this book breaks what was almost a ten-book streak of List books that I either found mediocre or outright bad. The fact is that even though it evoked some big emotions, Hemingway does have a Woman Problem and, I'm increasingly convinced, a Race Problem. As usual I consider myself unqualified to talk about race, so I'll focus on the woman thing. I had a really hard time with Brett as a character. If you want to know where that trope of "she's using him because he's safe and she'll run away with the bad boy eventually," you don't need to look any farther than this. Brett is frivolous to an almost comical degree. Once again, I'm a victim of my lack of notes, because I can't point at any specific instances of nonsense. I really am trying to take more of them, I swear, I just haven't figured out a good system yet.

A big deal was made, all over the foreword and introduction (that as usual I didn't read), about how this novel is about the Lost Generation and that's cool but I don't really care all that much about it. If I've learned anything by being a member of the generation being demonized at the moment, it's that most things that matter aren't really generational.

Problems aside, if you carry your torches with you into this book, you won't regret it.

- - - - -

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

- - - - -

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

- - - - -

Hemingway Write Good

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

As I mentioned in my review of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's style takes a bit of getting used to. The quotation above is the first paragraph of the novel, and now here are some graphs or something for you, because yikes.

There are 126 total words in the paragraph, but only 62 different ones. "The" shows up a full 24 times, and "and" accounts for another 15. Here's a terrible pie chart of all of the words:

So maybe I'm not being entirely fair. There are 43 words that only show up once in the paragraph. But let's say I combine words that have the same root, like "dust" with "dusty" and "falling" with "fell." Not a big difference, except that now there are only 37 words that only show up once. And here's the ones that show up more often:

And here's where I show off how bad my grammar is, because the last step was just to take out the random words whose names I don't know, i.e. anything that wasn't a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. So yeah:

So I guess what I'm trying to say is did any of you read Hemingway in high school?

Awkward!

"Othello with his occupation gone," she teased.
"Othello was a nigger," I said.

Ok, so, uh, the quote above is from A Farewell to Arms. This isn't the first example of the "N word" on The List (Scoop, I'm looking at you), but it's definitely the most shocking so far.

Every possible swear word in the rest of the book is censored, and then BOOM. Referring to a Shakespearean character, our main character Frederic Henry has only this to say. I'm not an enormous fan of this character to begin with, and this kind of attitude certainly doesn't help.

74. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Holy hell. Finally a book written in the 20s. -M.R.

Uncomfortable Plot Summary: Ernest Hemingway recounts his exploits disguised as fiction.

Year Published: 1929
Pages: 484 (in large print, bitchez)
First Sentence: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:
So let's talk about Ernest Hemingway. For some reason I know him as a famous misogynist, but I don't remember where I got that idea. Ten Things I Hate About You? I have no clue. (In an effort to figure out where this accusation comes from before reading much/any of his fiction, I did read this article about Hemingway and early 20th century crises of manliness that was kind of intriguing.)

I read For Whom the Bell Tolls a few years ago and mostly came away from it with the feeling that I really don't know anything about Spain. Also the book was quite a bit of a slog, so I'm relieved to report that A Farewell to Arms is quite a bit better. Like, way better.

But it also makes it extremely clear why Hemingway is considered a misogynist.

The book is the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, who is, for some reason, an American driving ambulances for the Italian army during World War I. (I'll tell you right now, it took me an embarrassingly long time to remember that the Italians were Good Guys that time around.) Henry meets an English not-quite-nurse named Catherine Barkley, and then gets injured. Catherine ends up caring for him in the hospital, and Henry ends up caring for her in the hospital by getting her pregnant. (I saw a Hemingway biopic called In Love and War about a million years ago starring, no kidding, Chris O'Donnell in the lead role, that basically fictionalized the real-life version of this story. Y u so semi-autobiographical, Hemingway?) The ordeal of the story is basically Henry and Catherine's effort to stay together during wartime and also a time when unmarried women really weren't supposed to be having babies.

So this is a love story, but just look at this:

"And that's it?" Catherine said. "She says just what he wants her to?"
"Not always."
"But I will. I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you?" She looked at me very happily. "I'll do what you want and say what you want and then I'll be a great success, won't I?"
"Yes."
"What would you like me to do now that you're all ready?"
"Come to the bed again."
"All right. I'll come."
"Oh, darling, darling, darling," I said.
"You see," she said. "I do anything you want."
"You're so lovely."
"I'm afraid I'm not very good at it yet."
"You're lovely."
"I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want."
"You sweet."
"I'm good. Aren't I good? You don't want any other girls, do you?"
"No."
"You see? I'm good. I do what you want."

I hope I don't have to explain why that passage makes me a bit uncomfortable. Catherine doesn't really seem like a fleshed out person, just a sort of beautiful fantasy creature.

I'm also not going to pretend that that ruined the book for me, though. There's strong stuff in it, Hemingway being, after all, the manliest of manly men. The style took a bit of getting used to (see a probable upcoming post on the topic for a more thorough discussion of this), but after that I had no problem with it. Ironweed was a little bit like this, although Hemingway is a more masterful writer than Kennedy, conveying everything he needs to in spite of his sparseness, at least emotionally. I found most of the actual action really dry, though.

The novel gets stronger as it goes on, and hopefully I'm not spoiling too much by saying that there's a lot of moving stuff that comes up at the end when Catherine finally goes into labour. (Not to mention my modern horror throughout at her constant alcohol consumption and apparent total lack of prenatal care.)

There are further Hemingway novels ahead on The List, but for the time being I'll say that this one is well worth a read, long before I'd recommend picking up For Whom the Bell Tolls.

- - - - -

"I wish there was some place we could go," I said. I was experiencing the masculine difficulty of making love very long standing up.

- - - - -

"Yes," said Gino. "But those were Frenchmen and you can work out military problems clearly when you are fighting in somebody else's country."
"Yes," I agreed, "when it is your own country you cannot use it so scientifically."
"The Russians did, to trap Napoleon."
"Yes, but they had plenty of country. If you tried to retreat to trap Napoleon in Italy you would find yourself in Brindisi."
"A terrible place," said Gino. "Have you ever been there?"
"Not to stay."
"I am a patriot," Gino said. "But I cannot love Brindisi or Taranto."

- - - - -