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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway | Literature & Fiction
Registered by sarradee of Dallas, Texas USA on Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Average 2 star rating by BookCrossing Members 

status (set by 1001-library): available


3 journalers for this copy...

Journal Entry 1 by sarradee from Dallas, Texas USA on Tuesday, January 17, 2006

This book has not been rated.

Amazon.com
The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.

Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.

But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin


A group of thirty somethings in the nineteen twenties get bored and go to Pamplona to watch the bullfights. Interesting descriptions of the "running of the bulls" and bull-fighting.

This isn't a story with a beginning, middle and end, Hemingway describes a chunk of time and all the events that happen therein.

3rd in my 2006 Read as many of the TIME Magazine 100 Best Novels challenge.
 


Journal Entry 2 by sarradee from Dallas, Texas USA on Monday, February 06, 2006

This book has not been rated.

Mailing to perfcangel who accepted it from me on the relays. Enjoy! 


Journal Entry 3 by perfcangel on Wednesday, February 15, 2006

This book has not been rated.

Thanks for sending this, sarradee! I will admit I have boycotted Ernest Hemingway ever since I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was a teenager, but I feel it's time I forget personal grudges and give him another try. 


Journal Entry 4 by perfcangel on Saturday, March 15, 2008

2 out of 10

Turns out Hemingway is not for me. He has a skill for writing about what I would rank highly as Subjects That Bore Me, and he seems to love describing minutiae that I think should be left out of stories. He also wrote the entire novel in first person with a complete lack of emotion. I get that the lack of emotion and detailed minutiae create a sense of ennui that is the very reason the book is so revered, but it's just not my flavor of ice cream. I am parting ways with Hemingway once and for all. 


Journal Entry 5 by 1001-library from Helsinki, Uusimaa Finland on Sunday, May 25, 2008

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Thanks so much for your donation perfcangel!

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