Genre Fiction
![Ernest Hemingway - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APYVZU.jpg)
![Patrick Hemingway - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B01IDW8UFS.jpg)
The Sun Also Rises: The Authorized Edition
The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
Editorial Reviews
"An absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative... a truly gripping story… magnificent."
-The New York Times
"The Sun Also Rises is a novel of great silence. Something central is hidden, which the reader discovers little by little. The characters are rich, interesting, fascinating, and a little bit tragic, as Hemingway's characters always are."
-Mario Vargas Llosa
"Hemingway writes as if he had never read anybody's writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself."
-The Atlantic
"The Sun Also Rises introduced me to a kind of exotica, a glamour, a life that I couldn't believe. I was seduced by it."
-Edna O'Brien
-The New York Times
"The Sun Also Rises is a novel of great silence. Something central is hidden, which the reader discovers little by little. The characters are rich, interesting, fascinating, and a little bit tragic, as Hemingway's characters always are."
-Mario Vargas Llosa
"Hemingway writes as if he had never read anybody's writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself."
-The Atlantic
"The Sun Also Rises introduced me to a kind of exotica, a glamour, a life that I couldn't believe. I was seduced by it."
-Edna O'Brien
Readers Top Reviews
Kindleworm Dot ComKi
My first taste of Hemingway and, honestly, i really have no idea what all the hype is about. The Sun Also Rises is nothing but rich-alcoholics-get-bored-with-Paris-so-go-off-to-a-fiesta-in-Spain-for-a-week-to-get-drunk-there-instead. They mostly do nothing but drink alcohol of various types and expenses of which Hemingway will inform you like any decent, decadent, wealthy alcoholic would. They eat when they get hungry, sleep when they feel they need to and watch a few bull fights; about which, Hemingway is rather keen to portray to the world that the local Spanish know him to be an “officianado”, and that everyone must accept that it’s the height of art and wonder to brutalise animals for the entertainment of drunks. Oh, and there’s lots of pathetic drunken arguments with pathetic drunken people arguing about other drunken people, or about people who won’t get drunk with them — with a good dose of antisemitism thrown in, which was only necessary if Hemingway was eager to portray his antisemitic credentials to the world as it bought absolutely nothing whatsoever to the actual story. Blah, blah, blah… …mostly, it’s all just typical drunken alcoholic boring twaddle written down through the haze of a hangover the next morning. And now i can’t be bothered to write another word about Hemingway ever again, and i certainly won’t be reading any of his other books. I gave him a chance and he failed miserably — but failing miserably is what alcoholics do best.
Michael RylandI. Jon
If one were taking a course on "The American Novel in the 20th Century", I'm sure Hemingway would be featured prominently. However, for pure reading enjoyment, "The Sun Also Rises" falls flat. We meet a cast of characters that are tedious, scheming and wholly unlikable. We are then presented with a story that is little more than the characters doing a few things in between extended bouts of drinking. This is simply another Hemingway exercise in "manly men", chasing "confused women" during the years between wars. I've never been particularly taken by his celebrated style of sparse writing. For depth of character, give me Steinbeck. For richness of story, Faulkner. And for artful concision, I'll take Vonnegut. Hemingway has, and should have, lost his place among relative American writers of the 20th century.
Diana S. Long
. Written in the 1920's, the author and his friends would be termed the “lost generation” and it does suit them. Personally, at least for me I find Hemingway and his writing style, frankly over rated. The discourses between the characters are minimal and it's not so much what they are saying but what they aren't saying. They meet up, they drink to excess, they insult each other and have a row or two, they separate and travel back and forth from France to Spain. The author gives us peaceful moments when his narrator Jake Barnes goes on a fishing trip or swims in the ocean to the excitement of bull fighting and a fiesta. They dance, they party and tell themselves what a swell time it's been but was it? Was it ever enough for anyone in this group? When I finish the book, I'm left with the feeling, What the hell was that all about? I thought the characters were superficial, the never ending cycle of day after day, night after night of trying to satisfy that lust for life which is a delusion at best. Perhaps one day, I will acquire a taste for Hemingway but today is not that day. I will however give it a high score because I realize what bothers me about this novel is what will make me think often of it.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter One
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly's star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.
I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of him.
Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife; and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter. As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.
The divorce was arranged and Robert Cohn went out to the Coast. In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By that time Cohn, who had been regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor. It was his money and he discovered he liked the authority of editing. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he had to give it up.
By that time, though, he had other things to worry about. He had been taken in hand by a lady who hoped to rise with the magazine. She was very forceful, and Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand. Also he was sure that he loved her. When this lady saw that the magazine was not going to rise, she became a little disgusted with Cohn and decided that she might as well get what there was to get while there was still something available, so she urged that they go to Europe, where Cohn could write. They came to Europe, where the lady had been educated, and stayed three years. During these three years, the first spent in travel, the last two in Paris, Robert Cohn had two friends, Braddocks and myself. Braddocks was his literary friend. I was his tennis friend.
The lady who had him, her name was Frances, found toward the end of the second year that her looks were going, and her attitude toward Robert changed from one of careless possession and exploitation to the absolute determination that he should marry her. During this time Robert's mother had settled an allowance on him, about three hundred dollars a month. During two years and a half I do not believe that Robert Cohn looked at another woman. He was ...
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly's star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.
I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of him.
Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife; and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter. As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.
The divorce was arranged and Robert Cohn went out to the Coast. In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By that time Cohn, who had been regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor. It was his money and he discovered he liked the authority of editing. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he had to give it up.
By that time, though, he had other things to worry about. He had been taken in hand by a lady who hoped to rise with the magazine. She was very forceful, and Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand. Also he was sure that he loved her. When this lady saw that the magazine was not going to rise, she became a little disgusted with Cohn and decided that she might as well get what there was to get while there was still something available, so she urged that they go to Europe, where Cohn could write. They came to Europe, where the lady had been educated, and stayed three years. During these three years, the first spent in travel, the last two in Paris, Robert Cohn had two friends, Braddocks and myself. Braddocks was his literary friend. I was his tennis friend.
The lady who had him, her name was Frances, found toward the end of the second year that her looks were going, and her attitude toward Robert changed from one of careless possession and exploitation to the absolute determination that he should marry her. During this time Robert's mother had settled an allowance on him, about three hundred dollars a month. During two years and a half I do not believe that Robert Cohn looked at another woman. He was ...
