Sun Also Rises

Rating:
Summary: Hemingway's first and best
Review: After reading five Ernest Hemingway novels for a literary research paper, the author's style has begun to become monotonous. Looking back, however, The Sun Also Rises seems to be the most fulfilling book of the five. Its morals are clear, but in true Hemingway form, the sparce writing style makes the reader think.

If you want a true taste of Hemingway, try The Sun Also Rises.

Rating:
Summary: A war story
Review: The book is about war and falling in love and losing it in the end.His since of charactarizing himself differently than the other characters, makes the reader feel that story could have actually taken place in history.I would reccomend this book to any one that like both love and war stories.

Rating:
Summary: The First Great Hemingway Novel
Review: The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway's first full-length novel, and in it, he began to perfect the characteristics of what Philip Young would call the "Hemingway hero." Jake Barnes is a profoundly and permanently wounded WWI veteran. The novel is about Jake's struggle to find a way to deal with his wound and the desire he has for the great love of his life, Brett Ashley. This is not Hemingway's best book, but Jake's struggle is heart-wrenching nonetheless. In this novel, Hemingway's "iceberg technique" is alive and well, which has led many readers to misunderstand Jake's wound and its implications. The Sun Also Rises should be read by anyone who values great literature. It is hard to believe that Hemingway was only 27 years old when this novel was published! A wonderful read by what I consider one of America's finest authors.

Rating:
Summary: Damn fine!
Review: Having visited Pamplona during the "Running of the Bulls," this book has a little more added meaning for me. Nevertheless, the book should be enjoyed by most everyone who reads it. Don't buy it looking for action or adventure, it has very little. Knowledge of the Spanish countryside makes the book more enjoyable, but is definitely not a requirement. Anyway, it is a great story of Jake Barnes, an expatriate of the first world war, who seemingly just can't catch a break. He is injured in the war and is unable to perform sexually because of it. He is hopelessly in love with Lady Brett Ashley who is a nymphomaniac, for lack of a better term. he seems all alone because he can never have the one he loves and he struggles to find a meaning to all this nonsense happening around him. In truth he is trying to do what we all regularly do, find out what it's all about, life I mean. A superb novel. Adios mis companeros!

Rating:
Summary: THE SUN ALSO IS BORING...
Review: It is a funny thing. Some people, to say that they are "erudit", "intelligent", "cult", accept anything their teachers or friends tell them that is good, without questioning the real quality of the book they're reading. Because everybody says that Hemingway is a genius (he is), one can't assume the fact that this book is a pile of garbage; it is pure crap. DOn't come to me saying that this is a great portrai of the lost generation, blá, blá, blá. There is no plot at all, the character are ridiculous, the narrative style makes one want to kill the writer. ANyway, if you like to read a history that has absolutely no history in it (only characaters wandering through Paris and Pamplona), this is the right book...

Rating:
Summary: I tried but failed to enjoy this book.
Review: I saw this title on one of those 'Top 100 of the Century' lists, and now I am shaking my head in wonder, trying to figure out its redeeming qualities. This book is absolutely desultory, and I guess that's the point. I must say that I enjoyed "The Old Man And The Sea" much, much more.

Rating:
Summary: GOOD
Review: The Sun Also Rises, side by side with A Farewell to Arms, and bookended with A Moveable Feast and The Dangerous Summer, are the best of Hemingway. So much has been written in 60 years that yet another review seems indulgent and unnecessary. But so much of what is written about this book shows the shredded threads of over-analysis. Fact is, The Sun Also Rises established Hemingway as the most accessible and best stylist of the 20th century. No one surpassed him for plain-talking honesty. No one who has lived, lusted, loved, gotten drunk, or watched the corrida, hasn't felt reawakening in this sublime novel. Much of the story is dull as common life. I have always felt that Papa's greatness - witness The Old Man and the Sea - is secreted in the paradoxical vacuity of plain talk. Compare Gore Vidal. Compare Richard Ford. Compare anyone who has aspired to speak to the heart through the filter of Americanism. Only Hemingway transcends ethnicity and vulgarity and makes Americanism a fresh embracing of frontiers, a universal human standard. His characters are us. His failures are ours. Hemingway has been sullied with our obsessive need to atomize and interpret machismo and gender conflict. Is this not among the great cultural sins? He spoke for the ages - The Sun Also Rises compares with Hamlet - and we linger, pathetically, on his, or our, pathological fetishes. I re-read this great work most recently in Spain, amid the olive and orange trees, at a tough time in my life. It made me glad to be alive and suffering. It made me smell the air and look at the women and men in my life. It felt edgy, and good.

Rating:
Summary: The Lost Generation...
Review: Hemingway has written a novel about a world and characters that are both broken and wounded from the horrific damage done in World War I. The main character is Jake Barnes and he was made impotent by fighting in the war. So what is this novel about? It is about Jake searching to find ways to live with the chaos that is both inside of him and around him. When America was first founded, there was the assertion that Americans had no history and the dream was that Americans were different. But in 1926, America does have a history, and in Jake's case, it has made him unable to realize his nature (both physically and spiritually). Jake feels that he needs to learn the values that history cannot change, in order to live with himself and in the world. To discover these values, he looks to the characters around him to model his life after them. Is it Cohn the idealist, who eventually realizes he cannot make the world fit into his ideal picture of it? Is it Brett the realist, who accepts and even embraces the chaos? Or is it Romero the bullfighter, who is admired by Jake for his "control"? I think that bullfighting is an appropriate metaphor - trying to control the beast (life) that is trying to gore him. I feel that Romero is the model for Jake because he exhibits control of himself. Hemingway argues that to live in the chaos, one needs to control it. And to control the chaos, one needs to control oneself. Does Jake display self-control? More importantly, is Jake able to overcome the internal and external choas he is struggling with on a daily basis? Please read this important novel and let me know what you think... It truly is a question of paramount importance because it is applicable to everyone's lives.

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece of the Lost Generation
Review: Clearly THE book on the Lost Generation. I read it when I was fourteen, and it's something I have to read every couple of years or so, like "Catch-22," "On the Road" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude." For me, the Hemingway works which come closest to this are some of his short stories and "A Moveable Feast."

Rating:
Summary: Hemingway blesses us with his simplistic style.
Review: I truly enjoyed the clarity that Hemingway conveyed in a book where most people were drunk most of the time. However, the story does go deeper than a bottle of wine. Hemingway touches upon the attitudes and fears of English people living abroad in post-war Europe. The bull-fighting scenes are amazing in their vivid depictions of the sport. I don't even like or agree with bull-fighting and he managed to romanticize it enough for me. The characters are intriguing and very entertaining in their various relationships. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Hemingway or anyone who is about to visit Spain.