Divermarv

“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.”
“Yes.”
It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”
“Some people have God,” I said. “Quite a lot.”
“He never worked very well with me.”
“Should we have another martini?” – Lady Ashley and Jake Barnes.

A novel by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s “roman à clef” of his post-war years in Paris. Where he mixed with his fellow members of the Lost Generation. I feel Hemingway was juxtaposing the romanticized lifestyle of himself and his fellow expatriates. A wafting energy against the immutable landscape of Europe. A Europe which seemed to be the very picture of the unchanging earth. The fiesta in Spain with its annual celebrants, risking, and sometimes realizing, death for sport in the running of the bulls. Immersed in everlasting tradition, this little group of lost souls, lost to the scene around them and lost to each other, with Jake Barnes being one who can see a bit of both.

The original working title for the story was Fiesta, but after consideration, Hemingway changed the title to The Sun Also Rises, based on a quotation from Ecclesiastes: “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.”

For my part, there was a feeling of melancholy while reading this book. Many of the characters seemed to act out, but I felt they were doing so because they were indeed trying to find a path. Lost, but for a myriad of reasons. And when they came together there was almost this continual scraping of the veneer of social graces… revealing the true nature beneath.

I greatly enjoyed reading this book. Hemingway has a way of showing us real people; without all the trappings of normalcy, but rather who these people really are.