The Sun Also Rises, 1926
Everyone behaves badly—given the chance.
“It is a relief to find that The Sun Also Rises
maintains the same heightened, intimate tangibility as the shorter
narratives and does it in the same kind of weighted, quickening
prose. Mr. Hemingway has chosen a segment of life which might easily
have become ‘a spectacle with unexplained horrors,’ and disciplined it
to a design which gives full value to its Dionysian, all but
uncapturable, elements. On the face of it, he has simply gathered,
almost at random, a group of American and British expatriates from
Paris, conducted them on a fishing expedition, and exhibited them
against the background of a wild Spanish fiesta and bull-fight. The
characters are concisely indicated. Much of their inherent natures are
left to be betrayed by their own speech, by their apparently aimless
conversation among themselves. Mr. Hemingway writes a most admirable
dialogue. It has the terse vigor of Ring Lardner at his best. It
suggests the double meanings of Ford Madox Ford’s records of talk. Mr.
Hemingway makes his characters say one thing, convey still another, and
when a whole passage of talk has been given, the reader finds himself
the richer by a totally unexpected mood, a mood often enough of
outrageous familiarity with obscure heartbreaks.
…The love affair of Jake and the lovely, impulsive Lady Ashley might easily have descended into bathos. It is an erotic attraction which is destined from the start to be frustrated. Mr. Hemingway has such a sure hold on his values that he makes an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative of it.
…
“No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character.”
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