Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN num: 9780020518709
ISBN number: 0020518706
Label: Macmillan Pub Co
Manufacturer: Macmillan Pub Co
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 247
Printing Date: 1982-03
Publishing house: Macmillan Pub Co
Sale Popularity Level: 351816
Studio: Macmillan Pub Co
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The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway's very first big novel, and immediately established Hemingway as one of the great prose stylists, and one of the preeminent writers of his time. It is also the book that encapsulates the angst of the post-World War I generation, known as the Lost Generation. This poignantly beautiful story of a group of American and English expatriates in Paris on an excursion to Pamplona represents a dramatic step forward for Hemingway's evolving style. Featuring Left Bank Paris in the 1920s and brutally realistic descriptions of bullfighting in Spain, the story is about the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley and the hapless Jake Barnes. In an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions, this is the Lost Generation.
Amazon.com Review:
The Sun Also Rises very first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: 'Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that.' His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the 'cool crowd' we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.
Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the 'wonderful nightmare' of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. 'My God! he's a lovely boy,' she tells Jake. 'And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn.' Whereupon the party disbands.
But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin
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Rated by buyers 
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Dave Foster Wallace urged writers to eschew irony. I feel the same way, and the reason is that for irony to have its effects the society at large must have a solid moral center of good permeating though it, like it did even after the very first world war, although that center was by then seriously deteriorating. Then, when one reads a book like this, one clearly understands and is not afraid to feel the irony of this book; its amoral characters, and its nihilistic portrait.
By 2008, that center is nowhere to be found, and hence readers look for something else in any book; sympathize with the characters, to get something warm and true in the positive sense from the experience, to "enjoy" books, rather than learning a dry lesson (the spare prose helps) in the negative.
These are atrocious characters. All of them, even Cohn to whom the center of good gravitates simply because he is an old world degenerate rather than a new world one. You don't go around beating people up.
I don't know how clear I was in expressing my thoughts, but I feel that irony in writing has outlived its usefulness.
Rated by buyers 
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A timeless classic -- that still moves me, even now - years after my very first reading!
Rated by buyers -
I'm 47 years old, have read thousands of books, and until this week had never read Hemingway. It was only finding myself out of town without a book that I snatched up my high school son's edition of The Sun Also Rises.
This is a very well written, relatively short novel which takes about five hours to finish at a leisurely pace. I must say, that for the very first 50 pages or so, I was not impressed. Not a whole lot going on and what was happening didn't exactly get the heart racing. As the characters in the book relocated from Paris to Pamplona, however, I started to become engrossed in the story. I found myself reading later into the night, not feeling sleepy at all and not wanted to leave the story.
The novel follows a group of American and British expatriates in the interwar years (1920s) as they loll around and party their way through France and into Spain for the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. The characters are predominantly alcohol soaked wastrels whose life consists of drinking, eating, drinking, passing out, drinking, going to bull fights, drinking, eating, passing out, drinking and doing a little fishing on the side.
It is a tribute to the beautiful, highly descriptive writing of Hemingway that such a backdrop can be crafted into an entertaining read, but I must say he pulls it off. This novel has certainly motivated me to read more Hemingway.
Rated by buyers -
I had mixed feelings about this one. It starts off a little choppy and the characters are hard to differentiate at first. Worse, most of the people in this book aren't all that likeable - they bicker continually and are often cruel to each other and everyone else they encounter (and some of them definitely express some anti-Semitic or racist sentiments.) With all that being said, though, the story and characters eventually come into focus, and I thought it turned into a fairly convincing account of disconnection, evasion, longing, disillusionment, and emotional pain. There's also a certain atmosphere that develops as the characters move through Spain drinking and fishing and sleeping with each other and fighting with each other and going to the bullfights. All of it began to feel very real to me, and I did start to feel sympathy for certain characters. Somehow the last line of the book hit me pretty hard and dramatically improved the way I felt about the entire story. I didn't like this one nearly as much as Old Man and the Sea, but the feel of the book still lingers with me.
Rated by buyers -
This is an old classic. The re-read was worth it. I noted interesting parallels with the author's (Hemingway's) real life. The descriptions of the fishing expedition in the Pyrenees was particularly good. It's still a worthwhile read, but that is the definition of a classic.
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