Review: The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book would make a good introduction to Hemingway's writing style, as it's a relatively short read and a tad more accessible in comparison to say, The Old Man and the Sea, that other short Hemingway work that most people I've talked to apparently hated. (I didn't mind it so much, but I'll admit it wasn't that interesting to me either).

Hemingway is largely known for a writing style known as the Iceberg Theory, which pretty much boils down to the idea that the words written on the page only scratch the surface of what is actually happening, hence Iceberg. My memory of the other Hemingway novels I've read might be a bit fuzzy, but I felt like this concept was the most jarringly apparent here, as there was always this lingering sense of words being left unspoken by the narrator in just about every scene and circumstance. He drags you into this strange, foreign world of expatriates, where arbitrary social behaviors and outlandish lifestyles are taken for granted, and no one seems to give a care in the world for what's going on around them. You get the impression that there's something fundamentally wrong or broken about Jake and everyone else in this story at some level, and they're all just too helpless or indifferent to do anything about it, so they just go about doing whatever it is they're used to doing. It's not that glamorous of a lifestyle, when you really think about it- even though the exotic allure is still there.

Jake Barnes, the narrator himself, has a way of sounding blasé about situations that would probably rile up most other people- drunken brawls, a cheating lover, bull fights, anti-Semitism, and so on. He goes on and on about a lot of events and then nothing in particular, and then at the end of the day you still don't really have a sense of what he really thinks about all of this. Or maybe you could infer it from the subdued way he talks about certain people around him, or his actions, but it's not really all that clear afterwards and probably still debatable today.

This novel is fascinating, but at the same time I get this impression that I would never want to meet any of these people in real life; none of them are really all that likable from the way they talk and act, and I found myself questioning Jake's own intentions by the end of it all. Considering how autobiographical the narrative is in a sense, it makes me wonder how much I'd have liked Hemingway as a person, if I ever met him. But it might also just have been how the early period of his life was; I distinctly recall liking the characters in For Whom The Bell Tolls a lot more, and that's a completely different perspective on the life of the expatriate... and quite frankly, much more admirable in comparison.