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Read fifty pages, you'll be bored. Judging by this book, what they really were missing was personality, a sense of purpose, and the ability to conceive of even a single shred of worthwhile, memorable drama. by what criteria, however, is beyond me.
Who happen to be getting bored and drunk in pretty places. Lost all right. Trust me, absolutely nothing happens, WHATSOEVER.The lost generation this may have been.
This book is a classic. If there are any real characters under the absolutely arbitrary routines of the wretchedly two dimensional people who populate this book, well then they are buried under the crushing weight of circularly formatted lists chronicling the daily activities of these fickle, unmotivated drunks with no imaginations. I dare you to try and read this and not lose your mind.
The foremost impression it gives is that of an oppressive tedium. Read fifty more, you will surely feel your brain turning to lead.
The characters are developed well and characterized in various and interesting ways. The plot keeps the reader interested with conflicts and resolutions along the way. In "The Sun Also Rises" Ernest Hemingway tells of the experiences that Jake has with the other characters, doing things that are exciting and enjoying each other. The settings are described in detail that brings them vividly to the imagination. This review was written by Jorge Broggio, author of The Good Days. Jake is friends with Robert Cohn, and Ernest Hemingway starts the book with a description of Robert. The book proceeds through a series of events to a pleasant resolution.
He even arranges for her date with the bull fighter,Pedro Romero,who is half her age. everything is focused on bitter depressed melancholy that doesn't make you sympathize with anyone,including the civil and courteous Robert Cohn who sounds from another planet.this might be a book telling the real life of a lost generation,the aimless confusing state of punch of Americans who ran to Europe for better homeland and security after world war I. that was my second novel of Hemingway. there is nothing in the story that you could describe as suspense,unexpected,exciting,optimistic or even natural. it has many similarities to Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" or "Babbitt" of Sinclair Lewis but of lower value. it is very easy read and there is no question about his unique way of writing in short dialogue style that was considered at that time as a new great prose.the story itself ,I think,is boring and has no goal.it depicts the meaningless lives of different characters,especially Jake Barnes, middle aged man,impotent and alcoholic,who is in love with Brett Ashley,seductive and pretty woman. Everybody in the book is lost ,seeking peace in alcohol and sex to the point of somebody is drinking and trying to have a "swell time" in every page.alcohol seemed like an escape from a rotten hopeless life and a cure of great depression in all characters.Jake ,through his hidden sexual inferiority complex,sounds like a real nice man who tries his best in making Brett happy.
They have some petty conflicts with each other, but honestly, who cares. Jake, Lady Ashley and a couple other guys, seem unable to meaningfully connect to each other in any way. Then they take the train. Usually if there is no action in a novel, at least there is some valuable insights into the human heart; none of that here. The most action you get is when they go to fish trout in the Pyrenees; one guy catches big trouts and the other one catches smaller trouts.On an emotional level, nothing happens either. It's somewhat of a mystery to me that some readers appear to have enjoyed reading this.
Then they go to bed. They really just hang out, drink, date, and then break up. In this book, Jake, a World War I veteran now a journalist, and his acquaintances go from bistrot to bistrot in Paris, then in Spain. The character, i.e. Just "I felt good"; "I felt bad"; "they had a drink" and then they went to bed (separately, mind you).I would pass on that. They drink and look at the landscapes.
Then the have dinner.
The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, is Hemingway's great first novel about the aftermath of World War I on a group of Americans living in Paris in the 1920's. But Brett Ashley, the woman he loves and can't get away from, is the vortex of all the emotional action. It's a new kind of stream of consciousness: not flashy, jazzy and allusive like Joyce, Woolf, or (three years later) Faulkner; but instead a steady chain of observations from the inner thoughts of someone who is sane, experienced, and who looks to report reality with a kind of shell-shocked, bunker objectivity; and whose emotions come through in the cynical realism one might expect from a survivor of an apocalypse.The emotion underneath the cynicism is subtle, and its impact is cumulative. The narrator and main character tells a story of aimless and pleasure-less indulgence, in which war trauma (physical and psychological) is the felt but unspoken source and context of all the emptiness in the characters' actions.
The book has a great last line which sums up all of this tough-minded despair.It may be a matter of opinion as to whether 'The Sun Also Rises' is a classic tragedy or just a well-executed exercise in morbid masochism. She is a woman who loves Jake and is not deceptive to him, yet because he can't satisfy her she uses other men for sex. She is a remarkable character in that clearly she is damaged like Jake (psychically if not physically), and yet she has a unique power that none of the men do, and in watching how she uses that power, one cannot decide to the very end of the story if she is more or less of a person than Jake, or if she has courage, or is worth much sympathy, or if her conscience is fully developed. In any case, it is unforgettable. Her deep complexity (and how it makes the reader react) is the greatest accomplishment in this story, but it is also perhaps its' most cynical statement in a book filled with such cynicism, about the powerlessness that emotionally damaged humans have over their own will. Its' view of life is bleak almost to a fault to the very end; but it has a kind of sparse poetic grace in its' descriptive language (though at times this leads to ambiguity of meaning), and the greatness is a product of this extremely original narrative style (to my experience) executed to perfect emotional and tonal effect.
She also has a conscience of some kind, so she occasionally struggles to manage the side-effects of her cold impulsiveness. It develops as one comes to trust Hemingway as a truth-teller. Jake Barnes is the narrator and is the owner of the consciousness being so artfully described.
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