The Sun Also Rises at 100 (Part 1)

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises, his first novel. To mark its 100th anniversary, it felt fitting to re-read the book and to reflect on why I think it's an American masterpiece.

The first time I encountered this book was in my AP English class in high school. I was instantly hooked on Hemingway's style and his Prohibition-era tale of American and British expats behaving badly as they gallivanted through Europe. At the same time, I didn't really get a lot of what Hemingway was trying to say with this novel. There were so many descriptions of eating and drinking (lots and lots of drinking), checking into hotels ... and then checking out of hotels, and digressions about fishing that were, well, kind of boring.

My 1986 copy of The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises made a big impression, though, and it served as my formative guide to Spain. When I studied in Salamanca the summer after my freshman year in college, I recall asking the father of my host family if he liked going to bullfights. I mean, that's how Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, and their erstwhile friends wiled away languid afternoons after their siestas, was it not? He laughed and said he preferred soccer. It was a classic study abroad moment: learning there was a big difference between literary Spain, and actual Spain.

One of the great things about books is how you engage with them differently at various stages of your life. On my first reading of The Sun Also Rises at age 17, I was fascinated by Brett but didn’t quite understand her or why she was so self-destructive. When I picked up the novel again about 15 years later, I was somewhat startled to realize that I was about the same age as the main characters. I found the book profound, and devastatingly sad, in ways I could not have grasped as a teenager. At an age when they should be settling into relationships and careers, these characters are a mess – a true "Lost Generation" – after the tumult and horrors of World War I. Brett, as manifested by her promiscuity and alcoholism, is obviously drowning in grief for losing the love of her life during the war, and then being unable to make a life with Jake given that their love is impossible to consummate.

Two decades later, the book has lost none of its power for me. I love the vividness of Hemingway's prose (more on that in Part 2 of this blog post). Unlike other novels, there is no character growth in The Sun Also Rises, and that's the point. His characters are aimless and amoral, though Jake is the exception and does live by his own code of honor that keeps him going. He and his friends have nothing much to talk about beyond their dislike for one another, and little on their agenda other than which cafe to stop into for their next whiskey and soda. Their purposelessness is contrasted with the vitality and bravery of the young bullfighter Pedro Romero, who is pointedly not part of their generation.

The last line of the novel – “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” – is Jake’s heartbreaking way of acknowledging that this stasis will never end. The war cut down any hope he had of a lasting love, a family, or a traditional life. Jake has the means to travel and to enjoy creature comforts as he moves from the glamourous cafes of Paris to the exoticism of the Pamplona bullring. But he will never progress in life.

In this reading, I was also more painfully aware of the antisemitism that permeates the book. It will be a perennial debate as to whether Hemingway himself was antisemitic. I don't know enough to say, but I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt here and hope that, above all, he was trying to capture the realism of his times.

It's curious that Hemingway begins the book not by introducing Jake or Brett, but instead the Jewish character Robert Cohn (we know he's Jewish because Hemingway tells us this in the very first paragraph). Hemingway's seeming fixation on Cohn's Jewishness reflected, I'm sure, how many people spoke about and thought about Jews at the time. Perhaps this was not Hemingway's own sentiment, and he instead was seeking to comment on the treatment of "the other." The same goes for his language about other minorities in the novel.

I never knew very much about the genesis of the novel, but I did a bit of research after this reading and learned that it was inspired by a real-life trip that Hemingway took to Spain in 1925, with several of the characters based on his real-life friends. (Gosh, they must have been just thrilled at how they were depicted.) Check out this interesting piece in Smithsonian magazine if you'd like to learn more.

If you've never read The Sun Also Rises, the 100th anniversary is a good a time as any to pick up this book. Hope you enjoy it!