Coming off reading A Moveable Feast last year, I was excited to delve into Hemingway’s fiction and figured The Sun Also Rises, his first novel, would be the appropriate place to start. Unfortunately, I would put The Sun Also Rises beside books like Frankenstein and A Tale of Two Cities on the list of literary classics that I respect for how successful they are in their artistic execution, but ultimately cannot say I loved.
It goes without saying that Hemingway is an incredibly talented writer, and I can think of very few authors, if any, who manage to express so much with so few words. The witty dialogue in The Sun Also Rises is some of the best I have ever read, and I this novel does a fantastic job capturing the angst, directionlessness, and disorientation of Hemingway’s generation who spent their youths searching for purpose, direction, and love in the aftermath of World War I. The novel reads very much like a fictionalized version of A Moveable Feast, and ultimately I prefered reading Hemingway’s personal experiences more than I did these fictionalized ones.
Ultimately, when I read fiction, I greatly value plot, character development, and rich themes. There isn’t much of any of those elements here. By design, The Sun Also Rises is fairly structureless, reading more like a series of Jake’s journal entries and stories of his friend group’s shenanigans in France and Spain than it does a proper novel.
Again, I can respect it and I’m glad I read it, but it just did not resonate with me. I look forward to reading one of Hemingway’s other works that tackles some different subject matter.
The Once and Future Lit 