The Sun Also Rises

Fuck yeah, Hemingway!

I actually struggled a bit with this one. It's a slow starter. Nothing really happens for the first hundred pages or so - but that's kind of the point. We meet the cast of characters, fucking around and constantly drunk in Paris in the 1920s, no cares in the world, but also no real purpose in life. Then the action ("action") shifts from Paris to Spain - specifically Pamplona, during the running of the bulls - and the aimlessness and pointlessness of every character gets thrown straight into a wall of a week-long bull-killin' party. Everyone's drunk as hell, there's nothing to do but get drunk as hell, and our band of merry traveling expats turns on one another, getting into petty, drunken scuffles.

It's a real downer of a book, the central premise mainly being, "man, these people, huh?" and the world-traveling nature of the characters only barely masking their utter haplessness - hard-drinking, squabbling, not really doing anything with their young lives. Here's where the term "Lost Generation" was coined, used to describe this exact type of person - shattered and broken by serving in World War I, just milling around in Europe afterward without ever really giving a fuck about anything or anyone.

It's hard not to make Great Gatsby comparisons - vapid people with empty friendships, pining for something lost - and it makes sense that Hemingway and Fitzgerald, friends with each other and kindred Lost Generation spirits, would explore the same general spiritual malaise. It's maybe a little more overt in Gatsby, maybe a little vaguer here, but they're unmistakably the same disease.

In the end, I liked this book just fine, but it wasn't quite as crisp and boldly written as what I've come to expect from Hemingway after reading The Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms - but then, it's his first novel after all; maybe he needed more time to hone his iconic prose style.