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“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.��

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.��

I picked up this book as part of my ongoing plan to work through the Pop Chart 100 Essential Novels list. Despite what I’m about to say, I don’t really quibble with this book’s inclusion. Ernest Hemingway is going to have a book on this list, and his debut novel—with its famous depictions of the running of the bulls and bullfighting in Pamplona—is apparently his best book and a quintessential example of his writing style of short sentences and understated descriptions. The novel so full of themes and symbols—masculinity, naturalism, sex, drinking, bullfighting—that I don’t know how I got out of AP American Literature 30+ years ago without being required to read it (or at least the Cliff’s Notes version 😄).

Unfortunately, none of that intellectual understanding made my reading experience of The Sun Also Rises any better. Jake Barnes—a great character name, by the way—was injured in the war in some unexplained way that has left him impotent. He loves Lady Brett Ashley, but their sexless relationship is merely platonic, making his mounting frustration throughout the novel perfectly understandable. Brett is a surprisingly modern character. She’s in her mid-thirties and engaged, but she doesn’t want kids and regularly sleeps with other men with her fiancé’s knowledge. But running from her problems into the arms of other men doesn’t make her happy. Instead, she just keeps hurting herself and the men who fall into her orbit, most of all Robert Cohn. And if there is a reason to exclude this book from lists of great novels, it’s the casual antisemitism directed at Cohn throughout the novel. It’s never made clear that Cohn is a perpetual outsider because he’s a Jew, but the other characters can’t stop mentioning that he’s a Jew, and one uses a slur, so it seems like more than coincidence.

But more importantly, it’s hard to overstate just how little happens in The Sun Also Rises. There’s an interlude where Jake and a friend go fishing, which symbolically contrasts with Paris and Pamplona but is not terribly interesting. The descriptions of the running of the bulls and the bullfighting at the Festival of San Fermin are cool. But you would have to read this book for yourself to truly understand how much of it is just characters running into each other while eating and/or drinking, and then talking about food and/or alcohol:

I went in and ate dinner. It was a big meal for France but it seemed very carefully apportioned after Spain. I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was a Château Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company. Afterward I had coffee.

The characters come together and go their separate ways in varying combinations throughout the story, but with little character development or growth. Instead, they all remain so unhappy, seemingly waiting for some purpose in life that they never find.

The Sun Also Rises is a roman á clef, in that the novel is apparently a fictionalized version of the time he and some specific, real people spent in Paris and Spain in the early 1920s. Even though I doubt that this sliver of American expats living in Paris fairly portrays that generation as a whole, my primary takeaway from this novel is a great sense of pity for that so-called Lost Generation who came of age in WWI. But understanding and pity doesn’t make the aimless, self-destructive lifestyle of a half-dozen unhappy characters interesting, and can’t salvage what is, ultimately, a rather dull story.