The Business School Wives Book Club: Part Six (America in Europe)

Some Book Club meetings are easier to cater for than others. When we discussed Three Cups of Tea we did so over delicious Pakistani snacks, and for our Rebecca meeting, I baked a tray of scones. But our discussion of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway was the winner in terms of feasting. We sat down to acres of tapas – with olives and cheeses and dates wrapped in ham and baked peppers and all sorts of lovely things. There was also plenty of red wine – although probably not quite as much as is consumed in the book.

The Sun Also Rises was Hemmingway’s first successful novel and it is short and sad. The narrator of the story is the hard drinking, eternally frustrated Jake Barnes and his subjects are his fellow American ex-patriots living in Paris in the 1920s. They seem to drift around the city in loose formation, drinking, talking about drinking, having romances and waiting for their money to show up from home. Jake homes in on a handful of characters in particular. He introduces us to Robert, an emotionally pathetic ex-pat novelist with a boxing background and an inferiority complex. Then there is Michael, a hard drinking, heavy spending guy who has to share his fiancée with every other man who comes along. The jewel of the novel is Brett, a woman of beauty, daring and staggering abandon, who everyone else is in love with. Most of all, Jake homes in on his own character; his visceral but unfulfillable love for Brett; his status as a member of a lost generation; his anti-Semitism; his need to be at the centre of things. This rag-tag band of souls leaves their makeshift homes in Paris and head south for Spain to see the fiesta. There, before the spectacle of the bullfight, Brett’s sensuous impulses and the groups’ collective tolerance will be tested to their limits.

Hemmingway’s writing is often imitated but seldom well. At its best it is an adjective-free series of clipped, masculine statements that builds up an emotionally convincing narrative – made clearer for all the things left unsaid. If you are a reader who likes flowers with your prose, this may not be for you. It is minimalist and unfussy. Because the language is cut down the symbols in the story become supremely important.

Jake and Brett make the central symbol. She is a woman who is literally addicted to sex. Hemmingway does not tell us why, he leaves us to wonder – but what ever the reason, if a man shows the least interest in her (and they usually do), then there is no stopping Brett. The man who loves her most however is Jake and he is impotent and can never give her what she wants. Jake is one of that small band of much pitied soldiers who were injured in World War 1 and never made love again. Together, Jake and Brett symbolise the so-called “lost generation” that Hemmingway was a part of. These were the people who lived most of their adulthood in the shadow of the First World War – and for whom there was no chance of innocence. Although both Jake and Brett want happiness, they are irreconcilable. Their love, which might have worked out in another corner of history is drained of joy and morality.

I loved it. I thought it was a moving and authentic read with real people and real disasters. I don’t know that I cared too much for the characters. I liked the self-knowing realism of Jake, but his pals were pretty charmless. Brett was the kind of character who was interesting because of the way she lived rather than anything she said. In fact, her conversation in the novel was almost entirely dominated by references to being “tight”. The Sun Also Rises is a novel that does a good job of dividing people. There are excellent and various bloggy opinions available from Mrs B at The Literary Stew, Gary at How Books Got Their Titles, Clover at Fluttering Butterflies, ANZ Litlovers Litblog, Steven Riddle at Flos Carmeli, Cody at Swann’s Thoughts, Linda at The Fill in the Gaps: 100 Project, For Comrades and Lovers and Ed Gorman.

I have found a picture of Hemmingway and since I learned from Gary at How Books Got Their Titles that Brett Ashley was modelled on Lady Duff Twysden I have also included a picture of her sitting alongside Hemmingway and friends in Paris. There are also a couple of shots of the 1957 film with Ava Gardner, hmmm; I feel a Book Club movie night coming on.