Rating: 
Summary: o.k.
Review: the sun also rises is about a group of friends in the post world war 1 era.they go on a trip to pamplona,spain to watch the running of the bulls but buried feelings come out in the open.jake barnes and lady brett ashley are two friends which the story evolves around and whose lives change as a result of their trip to spain.a classic but not that enjoyable.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrific story of Paris 1920s...fast and funny!
Review: There isn't a single false note or short-changed character in this book. A crisp and sharp-edged look at a few ex-patriates traveling around Paris and Spain, drinking endlessly, while they ask questions about how they are going to fit into the new post-war world around them.Frustration, anger, contempt was never better expressed than through these "lost souls" of the previous century. Hemingway was a master of the short sentences: his dialogue was funny without being "too clever" and cynical without being unnecessarily sarcastic. It's disappointing to learn others had problems with this book, I can't think of a single complaint...other than it was too short.
Rating:
Summary: Don't expect much.
Review: There is so much of Hemingway the man, the hunter, the drinker, etc., that may detract one from Hemigway the writer. That being said, this book, by any other author, would not be praised and talked about to the present day if there was not an image of the "great" Hemingway behind it. His distinct style is there and the chapters on fishing and bull-fighting are executed nicely. The characters, though, are boring, anti-Semitic drunks. Lady Brett Ashley, the eye candy in the book, is a trite, lying, promiscuous drunk who is anything but a lady. Mike is a pugnacious drunk. Bill is an indifferent drunk. Robert Cohn is a Jew and a non-drunk. Jake is the impotent drunk who narrates the story. In my insignificant opinion, I think the book would have benefited if we knew more about these people. Perhaps if I knew what happened to them, I could understand their behavior or the attraction of being drunk in Europe. Another thing, why is Robert Cohn in this book? It seems to me that he is there for others to let out their Jew comments on him. Every time he appears someone has to say they hate his Jew this or that. Perhaps, this was a prevalent attitude at the time, but again, I don't know. Without him there, the book would have amounted to the same thing. The New York Times, in their review of this book, wrote: "An absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heart-breaking narrative . . .It is a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard athletic prose . . .magnificent." If you re-read that statement, you'll see just how specious it and the book really are. Do yourself a favor and let the Hemingway worshippers read this book. Fitzgearld, in a drunken stupor, was a better writer than Hemingway. If you like "hard, athletic prose," that truly captures the beauty of life then try John Cheever's short stories.
Rating:
Summary: The Sun Also Rises
Review: I was quite distraught at the fact that I didn't enjoy a Hemingway. Maybe my literary tastes aren't quite as sharp and mature as they should be to enjoy this classic. But regardless, my review will not be a strongly positive one. The pointless meandering of the characters and their idle conversation gave me little to grab at. Jake, Brett, Cohn, and friends wander around in Paris and Spain as part of the "Lost Generation". It is irrefutable that this was the desired effect, but it was just too, well, boring. As expatriates, they spend their lives bouncing from cafes to bars in search of meaning (or inebriation) and from mate to mate (especially Brett). Various characters make various travels, but only when the group vacations in Pamplona, Spain, does the story go with it. The plot is empty, searching for something, indeed quite like the generation about whom it was written. Even though I didn't enjoy The Sun Also Rises, I do respect the fact that it is a classic book written by a classic author. For that alone, (and for the excellent reviews of most of the others,) this book deserves to be given a shot.
Rating:
Summary: Hemingway, not Fitzgerald, the Great American Writer
Review: Everytime I read a novel by Hemingway I enjoy it. I came to "The Sun Also Rises" expecting the same satisfaction. But I was wrong. "The Sun" is even better! Hemingway captures the voice of his characters through dialogue brilliantly. His sensitive portrayal of Jake Barnes, I'm thinking of the fishing scene, which conveys his loneliness, of the way he takes his friends to Pamplona to try to share his passion for bullfighting, his thwarted love for Brett. I would highly recommend this book for new-comers to Hemingway or those well read in the Papa-genre.
Rating:
Summary: Hemingway's First Masterpiece!
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: How does Jake Barne's injury affect his life?
Review: Jake Barnes was hurt in World WarI and since then he is impotent. This injury affects his relationship to Brett Ashley, the woman he loves, as well as his whole life. Brett Ashley is an aristocratic and irrestibly beautiful but she has a trauma and this makes her unable to change her way of living. Since her fiancé died in the war she has tried to forget or to hide behind drunkenness and lust. She is unable to have steady relationships. Her lovers change as frequently as the sun rises. Yet, as mentioned above Jake Barnes is in love with her. There is, however, his injury and secondly Brett's behaviour that makes love impossible. At first Jake doesn'tsee or doesn't want to see that he will never possess his true love.. He gets more and more jealous and absorbed. It makes him an eternal spectator of life. He is not able to live his own life. He is isolated and this makes him sick and purposeless. The war and his injury, in particular, made him a member of the lost generation. A generation that is so affected by the results of the war that they lost themselves. (see All Quiet On the Western Front) Jake's purposelessness is well shown by his drinking, by his treating of women ( Georgette and Brett) and by his travelling. He is trying to get away from himself. Merely the fact that he is an expatriate shows that he is homeless, a refugee. Once Bill, his friend, tells him: "You're a an expatriate. you have lost touch with the soil. You spend your time talking not working." His isolation and the fact that he is a spectator of life is well shown when he is in Pamplona watching the bull-fights. In the arena there is life going on. A bull fighter is so close to death that he lives his life with utmost intense but Jacke who is only watching outside, stays an eternal spectator of life.
Rating:
Summary: Gaseous
Review: Having just read an engaging 'Hemingway: The Final Years' I decided to have a go at The Sun Also Rises, it being the only Hemingway title on my bookshelves. I'd read it some thirty odd years ago and vaguely remembered enjoying the characters' romantic drinking sprees and idle chatting in Paris and Pamplona. I was prepared to put up with Jake's impotence and Lady Ashley's posturing and the linguistic mannerisms of the Roaring 20's. I was curious how well EH's work had held up for me, he and Kerouac, Steinbeck, and Pynchon being the great discoveries of my youth. And Reynold's work (I've only read the final volume of the bio) was sympathetic enough to encourage going to the literature. Anyway, after only a few pages it was apparent that the book would prove difficult beyond my means to finish, though I did 'gaman' (as we say here in Japan) for about a hundred pages. The dialogue is terribly contrived. Is it possible people actually spoke to each other so? Would you want to share a drink or several with these impostors? Even the most jaded, stoned 'preppie' couldn't imitate this bunch on a bet. I did enjoy the overlong verbal abuse Cohn's just dumped girlfriend gives him before her sayonara to England and out of the picture. Hemingway had known a woman scorned. No doubt Papa's influence on succeeding generations of writers and other adventurers was great but the product is painful now to read. It's as dated as the Charleston, flappers and rumble seats. The bored drinking is bearable, what else to expect from a generation that had survived The Great War, and may have been the only way this crowd could stomach each other's deceits.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Unconsummated Love Story
Review: "The Sun Also Rises" is the harrowing love story of a man who can't get any and a woman who can't get enough. It is one of the greatest unconsummated love stories of all time. In the closing scene, as Jake and Brett share one last taxi together, the reader now fully sees that it is Jake's sexual inadequacies that prevent the further blossoming of his relationship with Brett. There lies the conflict. The resolution is in the realization by both parties that what could have been will never be. In that realization, lies further conflict, as Jake and Brett must continue to find ways to resist the want of each other. The quintessential Hemingway formula for love becomes evident: in conflict, there is resolution, and in resolution, there is conflict.
Rating: 
Summary: Agonizing
Review: I'm sorry. I love to read. I love classics. But I would have to be able to discuss this in class or a book club to enjoy it. Hemingway's style is absolutely aggravating unless you read it with an eye of appreciation for what it did to American literature. This is probably a great read within a group, but I hated it as I trudged through it on my own.
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