Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway

I have mixed feelings about Ernest Hemingway. I loved Farewell to Arms but struggled through To Have and Have Not. And Hemingway himself was the kind of man I despise: a shooting, hunting, fishing type who loved bull fighting and drank too much and equated all these nonsensical pursuits with masculinity. So, mixed feelings.

The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway’s first full length novel. Finished in 1926 and told in the first person, the book is loosely based on a trip that Hemingway made to Spain with a group of friends to see the bullfighting during the Pamplona Fiesta.

Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

 

 

Having said nice things about Hemingway in my previous post on Farewell to Arms, I confess to finding this book hard going.

Ernest Hemingway; A Farewell to Arms

I never got on with Hemingway. Slow. Boring. About war and themes that didn’t interest me.

But I re-read this book – A Farewell to Arms – and decided it was truly brilliant. Maybe I am older, maybe I have time to savour the nuances, maybe I have stopped speed reading. I don’t know why, but this time the book read like poetry.

I didn’t really like the main character – the narrator. But that doesn’t matter. In the end, you get caught up with the story, with the relentless progress of the war and with the unfolding of the doomed love affair.