The Sun Also Rises

Stearns and I listened to The Sun Also Rises on our recent Mother's Day trip to Williamsport (Stearns: "Why do we have to get her flowers? Isn't coming home enough?"). For a little while I fell asleep and when I woke up, I asked Stearns what had happened. Stearns exclaimed, frustrated: "Nothing happened. Nothing happens in this whole book!"

The reader was terrible. He read twice as slowly as necessary and provided emphasis at all of the wrong points.

However, upon this reading, I enjoyed the book far more than I did the first time, when I don't think I even comprehended what Jake's injury was. The pace of the novel was very slow. Hemingway noted, almost ironically, very minute details. And he always noted what the group was drinking: most of the time some specific sort of alcohol, some of the time coffee (and, at other times, both at once, which I highly approve of). Jake's Catholicism is calm and understated.

Hemingway gets so many details of life right--the way in which groups form and seem to be more than they are--a new being is created. When one or two people leave the group, a great loss is felt. He gets the way that life is manageable during the day and much, much more difficult at night: "There is no reson why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't! I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off."

Brett walks over all the men. And yet we see some of the pain that has made her the way that she is.

And the descriptions of Spain and bullfighting are wonderful. And passion--aficionado. And there are plenty of euphemisms for being drunk, including tight, and daunted (my favorite). Bill: "Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public."