The Sun Also Rises
Isn't it pretty to think so?
Why read it
A group of expatriates drinks its way from Paris cafes to the bullrings of Pamplona, chasing pleasure and running from a war that left them unable to feel much of anything.
Hemingway's first novel captures the Lost Generation through Jake Barnes, a wounded veteran, and the restless circle around Lady Brett Ashley. Beneath the fishing trips and the fiesta lies a study of aimlessness, damaged masculinity, and the search for a code to live by when the old values are gone.
Published in 1926 and drawn from Hemingway's own trip to Pamplona with friends, the novel made him famous and helped fix his stripped-down style in American letters. Its epigraph from Gertrude Stein, 'You are all a lost generation,' gave an era its name.
- 01
The Lost Generation
The drifting expatriates embody a cohort hollowed out by the First World War.
- 02
The iceberg style
Hemingway leaves the deepest feeling submerged, conveyed through action and omission.
- 03
A code under pressure
The bullfighter Romero models the grace and courage the other characters lack.
- 04
Wounded desire
Jake's injury turns his love for Brett into a study of longing that can never be satisfied.
During the running of the bulls and the corrida at Pamplona, the young matador Romero fights with a purity that shames the drunken tourists watching.
The novel closes in a Madrid taxi, where Brett says they could have had such a good time together and Jake answers that it is pretty to think so.
