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Sun Also Rises (Scribner Classics) (Hardcover) (精装)
by Ernest Hemingway
| Category:
Classics, Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 268.00
MSL price:
¥ 248.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Written in Hemingway’s famously plain declarative sentences, this book is a quintessential piece of work on "The Lost Generation." |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 7 items |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
I loved this book, and thought it a little bit strange. The characters are so completely detached from their lives, and the bullfight and fiesta serve as an antithesis to their monotonous fleeting lifestyles. Some of the characters were so downright strange, and almost fake, that it left me with a kind of empty helpless feeling.
First of all, the female character, Brett, is one of the most fascinating characters I have ever read about. Her mannerisms, and life choices are so interesting. She seems very beautiful, and I can see why everyone is is love with her. The male characters are also interesting, the main character being almost emotionless and accepting of his life, although he is in love with Brett, he is happy to just be her friend. You get the feeling that being hurt in the war has really changed him, and made him apathetic, and happy to live vicariously through the bullfight. The character of Cohn is also really interesting, and dark, although the descriptions of him seem a little anti-semitic in this day and age.
The descriptions of the bullfights, and the fiesta in Spain, are truly magnificent, and make me want to go to Spain and see the bullfights, even though I am a longtime vegetarian and animal lover! The descriptions were just that powerful. The character of the bullfighter is also a classic literary character, strong and attractive.
The prose of Hemingway is different than anything I have ever read, and I like it. He doesn't say much, yet he says a lot. By sticking to the simplicity of a situation, he manages to expose the depth that lies beneath. All in all, I loved this book, and I think it is relavent today, and can be related to anyone who lives their life fleetingly from pleasure to pleasure. A lot of drinking in this book!
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
Not many writers are like Ernest Hemingway. His style is unique and nobody will ever write like him. He is one of my favorite novelists ever and his The Sun Also Rises one of my most beloved books ever. I know there are some problems with the narrative - and there is animal cruelty that bothers me so much, but, still, this is one of the best books I have ever read.
The feeling I had when I first read The Sun Also Rises is impossible to compare to any other work. The vitality and joy of this story was what I liked most. Despite the fact that it is a sad story, I can feel life coming from every paragraph. The book deals with the “Lost Generation”, those youngsters who lost their dreams and hope with the First World War. Afterwards they were so displeased with life that their motto was "Live fast, die young".
The pages of The Sun Also Rises perfectly translate this momentum: every second counts, do it now, because in the future you may not be able to do again. This is the feeling that all the characters are after. The feeling of being fulfilled. However, it is not easy to find out what fulfils each person - so that is the reason why they make so many mistakes.
At some point, Bill, one of the most joyful characters of the book, says, "Our stay on earth is not for long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks.' This perfectly summarizes the point Hemingway is trying to state. This is what he believed by the time he wrote the novel - in the mid 20's. The Sun Also Rises is one of the books that best show the way the writer believed people should live. All things that Hemingway liked in his life were there, like beautiful women, boxing, fishing, bullfighting and traveling through Europe. This may not be the most appropriated lifestyle for many people, but it sure worked in Europe circa 1925.
Not many writers would be able to writer a book like that. If one thinks of the matter of the fact, The Sun Also Rises is almost a book about nothing. However it never let the reader feel bored. The characters' lives can be boring - they are bored most of the time. But the reader is fully immersed in that universe that he feels like part of the group. It is not hard to believe that Jake, Lady Brett, Bill, Cohn and the others are not our friends. They are so exposed to us - that in the end we know more about them then themselves. In the end, we know so much about life that we could expect from a book. And Ernest Hemingway is one of the few who can do that.
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Mary Sibley (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
I sit writing this review from a beach chair. Since the day is gorgeous, I anticipate the sort of joy Hemingway celebrates. Among other things, he was a connoisseur of the natural world. He was also a connoisseur of the sorts of emotion experienced as one looks forward to an adventure. The book is dedicated to EW's first wife and his child. The first copyright is 1926, eighty years ago.
Robert Cohn boxed at Princeton to overcome feelings of inferiority and shyness. He fought only in the gym. In Paris he read books, wrote a novel, played tennis and bridge, and boxed. Robert went back to America with his novel. The publishers praised the work. Returning to France, Robert had become a very successful bridge player and had learned that women liked him. He asked Jake Barnes, the books narreator, to go with him to South America, having read W.H. Hudson. Robert Cohn became interested in Brett, Lady Ashley. Jake's head worked on old grievances. It was a rotten way to be wounded and it was a joke. Jake started to cry thinking he wouldn't have Brett. Brett is getting a divorce and she intends to marry Mike Campbell. At the Cafe Select Jake encounters Harvey Stone. In trying to begin his second book, Robert Cohn has lost his sureness. Jake begs Brett for them to live together. She says that it would not work.
Jake plans to shove off to Spain with Bill Gorton at the end of June. They are to go to the fiesta in Pamplona. Mike Campbell and Brett and Robert Cohn will also go to Pamplona. Robert Cohn, naive, brings out the worst in everybody. Jake admits to Bill that he has been in love with Brett, on and off, for a long time. The members of the party stay at the Montoya Hotel. Senor Montoya asks Jake if Bill is another aficionado. At Pamplona Jake is reading a story in THE SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES. Jake hears Brett and Robert climb the stairs in each other's company. There is a big religious procession. San Fermin is transferred from church to church.
Pedro Romero, a new matador, is outstanding. He keeps a pure line facing the maximum amount of danger in the presence of the bull. It seems that Pedro Romero learned some English in Gilbraltar. Brett tells Jake she believes she is in love with Pedro Romero. Mike announces that Brett has gone off with the bull fighter chap. Later, summoned, Brett and Jake rendez-vous in Madrid.
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Hawley (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
After reading A Farewell to Arms for my literature class and enjoying it immensely, I decided to pick up another one of Hemingway's works. Unfortunately, I chose this one. Through most of the novel, I was bored. I felt like the characters were doing the same thing over and over again. Let's go have a drink. Now let's have dinner and walk around. Let's go drink some more. I just don't see how this novel warrants all the praise it has received. |
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Bill Slocum (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
With all due respect to Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, nobody could make a better story out of nothing than Ernest Hemingway. No novel of his displays that more than his first, "The Sun Also Rises."
The world is spinning, and so is Jake Barnes' bedroom as he tries to sleep off endless boozy evenings. Living in Paris as a writer after literally losing his manhood in World War I, he wastes his days writing news dispatches and his nights drinking with comrades he can barely stand, not to mention wilting under the glow of a woman named Brett he loves but can't have.
Near the end of the novel, Jake neatly summarizes his last few days with Brett with the same asperity Hemingway would probably use if he wrote Amazon.com reviews: "Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right."
One nice thing about Hemingway is he doesn't need to work with much of a plot to draw you in. His writing style is so engaging in its efficient but alive-to-the-moment style that he can describe everyday things like Basque peasants passing around a bota of wine in a way that draws you in like a Jet Li fight scene, and makes real moments of action in a bullring all the more exquisite to follow.
Humor, too, makes this journey worth taking, as Barnes takes stock of his situation, the people drifting in and out, the different styles of bullfighting, and the casual cruelty of Brett with her various suitors, including a fellow writer named Cohn whom Jake suspects read one romantic novel too many too late in life. "For a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent," Jake narrates.
The fact Cohn is a Jew gets a working over, and Hemingway at times seems in danger of producing 1926's second-most anti-Semitic book. The author also presents alarming anti-black sentiments. Perhaps women are pilloried most of all. They come off here as harpies and vultures, none worse than Brett, whom Cohn in an inspired moment calls Circe for her ability to "turn men into swine."
Some say Barnes and Brett suffer because they know they are meant for each other, which is rot. Barnes' loss of his sex organs only spares him the opportunity to be cuckolded, which both acknowledge in unguarded moments. "I'd just tromper you with everybody," she says early on. No, Brett is one of those fascinating but heartless examples of the user as sexual athlete, and gives The Sun Also Rises a lot of its punch.
People talk about The Sun Also Rises as the calling card for the Lost Generation's literary wing, but while it may be true, it is hard to pigeonhole it too much. There's little talk about politics or the Great War, even intellectual matters don't really preoccupy this crowd, and the attitudes about religion are more muddled than dismissive.
Yes, maybe there's something here about the search for meaning after the certainties of civilization were blown apart by World War I, especially Jake with his love for bullfighting and paying his bills. But what makes The Sun Also Rises so special is the spirit of disenchantment that hangs over everything. Why bother trying to remake a world when there's drinking to be done?
The principle may be debatable, but it's rendered here with such precision, passion, and charm you go along with Jake and his bar- hopping buddies, enjoy their assignations and petty gossip like it was a prime-time soap opera, and after its over go back to read it again and figure out what you missed.
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Tad Nolan (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
Hemingway came to his style of prose by writing the truest sentences he knew. He says so in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of the Paris years when he was writing this, his first novel, but it also can be felt. The sentences in The Sun Also Rises don't read as programmatic or mannered; they read as fresh, vivid, and clean, as if each had its own brimming source.
Don't envy Hemingway that he was the first to write like Hemingway. The way he wrote was by working damned hard, harder than most writers have ever worked. He thought through each sentence as a thought as well as a sentence, and this is no easy task, and yields no easy formula. Hence the newness and subtlety, and the sense that The Sun Also Rises, though full of frivolous characters, is sturdy and never frivolous. It is unified by a sort of analytic integrity, and it needed a man with both feet on the ground to lend it weight.
The plot of The Sun Also Rises seems to make much of nothing. Food is talked about, drinks are drunk, and young people do a lot of not thinking. Jake, the American narrator, lives in Paris and travels to Spain to fish and watch bullfights. His principle companions are a preppy leech and a weak flirt. He's in love with the girl. And yet the story doesn't meander because it isn't distracted by the allure of the inessential. Go elsewhere to feel lost in France or Spain. Hemingway was interested in making, not describing - in building art through language like Cezanne built images in paint: with deep structure trumping impressionistic reportage. Like a Cezanne canvas, The Sun Also Rises seems drained of anecdote but never mundane. It forsakes the grand gestures but leaves the formal tension. Startlingly strong feeling bleeds through.
Is The Sun Also Rises his best book? Maybe. For Whom the Bell Tolls certainly beats it for scope and local color, and has the distinction of being one of the best war books ever written, and that's a category to care about. But he never topped his first novel in its revolutionary honesty. Read it when you're somewhat young, if you still have time. It won't give you a hero to follow or words to live by, but art with this sort of integrity can nevertheless teach you how to live. And that's heroic. |
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Robinson (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-04 00:00>
This is a great novel and it is an excellent novel but it falls short of being a masterpiece. Part of the enjoyment is the drama. I have not described the plot elements and those should be left as surprises for the reader.
I had read The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway about ten years ago and then discovered an essay by Raymond Chandler on writing. He was a famous detective writer and screenplay writer of the 1930s through to the 1950s. He made the comment in his essay on writing that Farewell to Arms set the standard for twentieth century fiction. With that encouragement I bought the book, read it, then ran out and bought most of Hemingway's other novels and a collection of his short stories. This novel from 1926 is not his best work, and perhaps Farewell to Arms would be his best. Some of his other works such as For Whom The Bell Tolls has much greater depth and balance than the present work. This is one of Hemingway's first, and it has a rough feel to it. It has a good balance of prose, story, characters, drama, and length, but it has a certain collegiate feel - almost a braggart feel to his macho story about having a good time in Spain and Paris.
For example, the Bloomsbury Guide has picked 375 top fiction authors, and among those 375 has picked 40 "masterpieces" and they included Hemingway's Farewell to Arms and not the present novel.
The novel does have certain originality and flair with the colourful description of the running of the bulls and the Spanish fair. The story is based roughly on his own war experiences of living in Paris and then visiting Spain to see the bull fights. The novel is superbly entertaining but a bit rough as a masterpiece and shorter than some of his great works.
The title of the book comes from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:5 but the book is about drinking and going to the bull fights.
The story is based on a trip by Hemingway with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and several friends to Pamplona, Spain, in 1925. They - along with other friends - are the source of the three main characters and it is roughly based on their experiences. The three protagonists are Robbert Cohn a Jewish American boxer, Lady Brett Ashley, and Jake Barnes the narrator.
They meet in Paris and then go to Spain and meet other friends and have a wild time for a few weeks. It has a certain "fraternity boys" feel to the book. It is macho and all about drinking lots of red wine and watching the bull fights and the celebrations surrounding the fights and then the injuries suffered by both the bulls and the fighters. He has a related book Death in the Afternoon which has many pictures and more details on the fights themslves and the participants. Also, some of the same material is covered in some of his short stories.
Part of the fun reading the book is the plot and I would avoid knowing any more than that until you read the book.
5 Star excellent and entertaining read.
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1 Total 1 pages 7 items |
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