The Sun Also Rises:A novel | Date: 14 April 2011, 02:50
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This, friends, was the single book that so fatefully launched Ernest Hemingway's amazing and long-lived literary career. As such it is as close to being a legendary book as they come, yet some seventy five years after its initial publication, it still offers a story that is also surprisingly fresh, personal, and memorable. For all of his obvious excesses, Hemingway was an artist compelled to delve deliberately into painful truths, and he attempted to do so with a style of writing that cut away all of the frills and artifice, so that at it s heart this novel is meant as a exploration into what it means to be adult and alive. Thus we are introduced to Jake Barnes, a veteran of World War One, now forced by his wounds to live as a man without the ability to act like one, forced by impotence to forgo all of life's usual intimacies, and all of its associated life connections for which he so yearns. At the same time, Jake attempts to live a life of meaning and purpose, one crammed full with activity, work, and friendships. Yet it is within this network of friendships and connections that he must confront his painful circumstances.
Enter his true love, the feckless Lady Ashley, and indeed the plot thickens, for we soon see how Jake's physical affliction has painfully affected several others. Ashley loves him, but needs a virile man who can give her the physical love she needs. While Ashley is a woman of uncommon beauty, she is also virtuous enough in her won way to want the one man she truly loves to be her lover. Like all of us, she wants most that which she can never have, and so she returns to the source of her own dilemma time after time to Jake, her emotional match, the one man who cannot give her the mature emotional love she craves. So they are condemned to circle around each other, even while some of their friends and other members of the in-crowd interfere, compete, and seek Ashley's affections around the edges of the continuing affair. What we are left with is a modern tragedy, one in which the characters must somehow resolve the irresolvable.
Yet for all this emotional turmoil and existential `sturm-und-drang' of the so-called "lost generation", people drowning in the moral anomie and circumstantial wasteland created in the gutters of their own endless wants and needs, it is most often Hemingway's imaginative and spare use of the language itself that wins the reader over. Unlike his predecessors, he sought a lean narrative style that cut away at all the flowery description and endless adjectives. In the process of parsing away the excesses, Hemingway created a clear, simple and quite declarative prose style that was truly both modern and revolutionary. What one encounters as a result is a story seemingly stripped to its barest essentials, superficially more like the newspaper man's pantheon of who, what, where, when, and why, and yet somehow transformed into a much more accurate and imaginative effort, one leaving the reader with a much more artful account of what is going on. One reads Hemingway quickly, at least at first, when one learns to slow down and drink in every word and every detail as it is related. For me and for millions of others, the true genius of Hemingway is to be found in his artful use of language. This book was Hemingway's first truly successful foray into the world of letters, and the result changed the face of modern fiction. Enjoy!
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