Ernest
Hemingway (1899-1961); The Sun Also Rises,
1926
Hemingway began his career as a writer in a newspaper office
in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the
First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army served
at the front and was wounded and spent considerable time in hospitals. After
his return to the United States, he became a reporter for The Toronto Star,
which sent him back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution. He
used Paris as his base.
The Sun Also Rises
is about a group of American and British expatriates who leave Paris, where
they are enjoying the City of Light in the Post World War II world, to experience
the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, to watch the running of the
bulls and the bullfights. For the last 91 years, it has always been in print.
It’s a great piece of writing.
The setting was unique and memorable, showing seedy café
life in Paris, the excitement of the Pamplona festival, and descriptions of
fishing trip in the Basque region of the Pyrenees.
Hemingway's writing is sparse, as is his use of
descriptions. The result is that most of the action is behind the scene. To
fully understand the book, the reader has to work fairly hard.
The characters are based on real people of Hemingway's
circle, and the action on real events. In the novel, Hemingway presents his
notion that the "Lost Generation", considered to have been decadent,
dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was resilient and strong.
Additionally, Hemingway investigates the themes of love, death, renewal in
nature, and the nature of masculinity.
The book reflects the times, and this is not always a good
thing. What really grates in my mind is its latent anti-Semitism. One of the
characters is Robert Cohn, who is typically just referred to as Cohn. At the beginning,
Hemingway describes him as having spent a great deal of time training as a
boxer, yet later shows him as using his skills as a boxer to hide emotional weakness.
This occurs when there is a dust-up over Lady Brett, the
beautiful British woman on the trip, who frequently changes bed mates. That
would not be shocking in modern novels, though it probably was when this book
came out. When she goes to bed with Cohn, she arouses his jealousy against
other members of the expedition, and he uses his fists to take revenge. Then he
goes weepy with remorse.
From the beginning, there are close bonds between Brett and
Hemingway. However, the book suggests that the story-teller can’t go to bed
with her because of war wounds. Hemingway was later married three times, and with
one of his wives had children. It’s interesting to speculate on what wounds he
had. Could it have been shell shock – what we today call post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD)?
