Reviewing the Best 100 Novels of the 20th Century
by Annette Ferran
The Sun Also Rises
What a joy it is to read—again—The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (#45
on the Modern Library’s list). My
edition is the Bantam paperback, 3 ½ by 5 ½ trim and not even 200 pages. You want to savor it, make it last, but
you just can’t help reading it all the way through in a single sitting,
oblivious to any other stimuli or responsibilities.
As
all literature students and most Americans know for a fact, Hemingway
single-handedly changed the way novels henceforth were written and, moreover,
established American Culture once and for all. It’s also been said that compared with his contemporary
William Faulkner, whom critics like to pit him against for the title of
Greatest American Novelist, Hemingway took few risks with his writing. It’s been suggested that perhaps
Hemingway has only ever told one story—the story of men and women—and that this
is somehow suspect.
A
Faulkner sentence can contain the entire history of several generations of
intriguing people. A Hemingway sentence is like noticing the unconscious
gesture of the stranger down the bar, his knob-knuckled fingers rubbed against
the back of his neck, say, that makes you want to go to bed with him.
The Sun Also Rises is “the bull-fighting
novel.” In the first paragraph we
meet Robert Cohn. In the last sentence of that paragraph, we meet “I.” In the second paragraph, “I” reverses
everything we thought we were supposed to know about this Robert Cohn and it
becomes clear that “I” (whose name is eventually revealed as Jake) is the
protagonist as well as the narrator of the story. The novel ends with one of
the most famous last lines in American literature: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” A devastating sentiment when
you arrive to it.
In
between, we have Paris and Pamplona, we have delicious meals and hard writing
work, gossip and conversation. We have Jake and his dissipated friends
attempting to ruin the life of a promising young toreador. Or is it that they just can’t help
themselves? Are these people lost, or are they living a life you wish you could
live for a little while? Are they troubled, or are they dwelling on their
troubles so as to feel more deeply the basic tragedy that is Life? Or are they
indeed more troubled than they are willing to let on to each other or even to
themselves and that’s why they talk to each other with this glibness and irony
and carelessness that you wish you could pull off sometimes, too, without
sounding like a jerk or a phony.
They
move from café to café, from half-adventure to half-adventure, from almost love
affair to almost love affair, through some of the most exciting events a human
being can endure, and the writing is so thoroughly lacking in apparent effort
that the novel is not so much a reading experience as a pure aesthetic
experience. No one can write like
this. Yet someone has.
Hemingway
is probably the most analyzed and critiqued American author ever. Don’t worry about that, just read the
novel. Again.
Annette
Ferran lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher. She is also an editorial assistant
for 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.
