Product Description

The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #555 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

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

From Library Journal
The publisher is using these two perennial favorites to launch its new Scribner Paperback Fiction line. This edition of Paradise marks the 75th anniversary of the smash 1920 first novel that skyrocketed Fitzgerald to literary stardom at the ripe old age of 23. Several years later, The Sun (1926), Hemingway's own first novel, performed an identical service for him at age 26. The line will eventually include additional titles by these giants as well as works by Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, and other greats.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Some of the finest and most restrained writing that this generation has produced."

-- New York World

"An absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heart-breaking narrative...It is a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard athletic prose...magnificent."

-- The New York Times

Customer Reviews

The sun went up. We had a drink. The sun went down. We had another.
It's difficult to review a writer like Hemingway. So often imitated, so often parodied, he practically reads like a parody of himself. One must constantly keep in mind that this guy was the original, that his distinctive style and unmoored narrative were something unique back in the day.

To talk around things too big to say--that's another Hemingway hallmark, and in *The Sun Also Rises* the thing too big to say is World War I and the devastating effect it had on its survivors, in this instance, the characters in this novel. The war is alluded to so obliquely that its importance in fully understanding this book may elude altogether those unfamiliar with the psychic cataclysm it caused in society after 1918. At the time, Hemingway didn't need to talk about the war directly; his readers would have recognized its presence in the shell-shocked attitude of his characters immediately. Hemingway's people advance through a series of alcohol-fueled encounters with each other, speaking elliptically, insulting, apologizing, coming to blows even--it's all one unending bender punctuated by fishing and bull-fights.

Jake, wounded in the war, has been rendered impotent--a kind of walking joke and metaphor that's none too funny. Brett is an alcoholic nymphomaniac who may ((or may not)) be driven to self-destructive excess by the inability to consummate her love for Jake. In effect, Jake is the wise, passive, philosophical eunuch at the center of this expatriate circle of friends. He is the mediating buffer between Brett's lovers, keeping the party going, as it were, defusing the potentially explosive passions around him when they don't simply fizzle out from sheer exhaustion.

By the end of the novel, carried along by the precision of Hemingway's prose, caught up in the ennui-inducing cadences you tend to forget the imitations and parodies that have all but rendered his style a hardboiled cliché. Perhaps it'll take a long while still before Hemingway can be "rediscovered" and fully appreciated again for the master that he is. But even now the boredom, futility, and impotent despair that weighs so heavily upon the characters of *The Sun Also Rises* can be felt today; indeed it's still an enormous part of our psychic landscape nearly a hundred years later.

If its not there already, this is a book to put on your short-list of must-read 20th century literary novels.

A story about immoral alcoholics
My main beef with this book was that no one was likable AT ALL. They were all a bunch of morally-bankrupt, selfish and snobby rich Americans who trot all over Europe satisfying their whims and drinking themselves into oblivion, all while imposing their disgusting lives on other people.(Autobiographical?) If you took out every reference to how drunk these people got, this would be a 50-page novella. You might say, "That's what Hemingway was trying to portray". OK, in that sense this was a powerful book because the characters' pathetic lives were so vividly impressed upon my mind. Perhaps. However, I could never recommend this novel for the very subject matter and tone of the novel. Hemingway's writing is, simply put, bizarre. He translates Spanish syntax anad phrasing into English, which results in awkward-sounding phrases and his descriptive abilities are marginal. I would pass on this one.

Bordering on self-parody
It's not a bad book. It is a tale of the "lost generation," the bitter, aimless men who saw the world end in WWI, but survived it. Having seen the end as young men, they seemed to live the remainder of their lives mourning the lost adrenaline rush, and seeking a way to find it again, such as bullfighting, or at least witnessing bullfighting, and glorifying the life "lived all the way up."

But Hemingway's vaunted writing style is almost ridiculous in its "manly" terseness, eschewing most adjectives and adverbs, and reading as if he had a court reporter in his head, transcribing whatever his eyes took in: "We passed through a town and stopped in front of the posada, and the driver took on several packages. Then we started on again, and outside the town the road commenced to mount. We were going through farming country with rocky hills that sloped down into the fields. The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain." (That's in Chapter 11. It goes on, but there is no real purpose to it, so I will spare you.)

Then there's my favorite passage, from Chapter 12: "The girl came in with the coffee and buttered toast. Or, rather, it was bread toasted and buttered." Yeah, Ernie, I wasn't feeling quite comfortable with that damned adjective either. "What does he mean by 'buttered toast?'" I asked myself. But then you told me, in your simple declarative style, just exactly what "buttered toast" meant. Thanks for clearing that up.

I'll give him a break, because it is a hell of a novel for a 26-year-old to write, but I wish he had gotten over the machismo thing in his writing before he died. Since he didn't, I'll still take Steinbeck as my favorite American author.

By the way, if the characters in this book truly drank as much as Hemingway said they did, fictional livers must be made of sterner stuff than real ones.