The Sun Also Rises

Written by Ernest Hemingway

Narrated by Geoffrey Giuliano and The Ark

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, his first, that portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. However, Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work", and Hemingway scholar Linda WagnerMartin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print.

 

The novel is a roman à clef: the characters are based on real people in Hemingway's circle, and the action is based on real events, particularly Hemingway's life in Paris in the 1920s and a trip to Spain in 1925 for the Pamplona festival and fishing in the Pyrenees. Hemingway presents his notion that the "Lost Generation"—considered to have been decadent, dissolute, and irretrievably damaged by World War I—was in fact resilient and strong. Hemingway investigates the themes of love and death, the revivifying power of nature, and the concept of masculinity. His spare writing style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action, demonstrates his "Iceberg Theory" of writing.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Audio Arts
• Release date: Aug 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798887670447

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961. 

Reviews for The Sun Also Rises

[9inchsnails · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tried writing a review about how Hemingway's style was still developing when he wrote this one, and how much it developed even in the three years between this and A Farewell to Arms, but I gave it up. The Hemingway trademarks--the stripped-bare, understated style, the sparse dialogue, the easy, natural flow of the story--are all here, and if I don't think it all came together quite as smoothly as it did in A Farewell to Arms, it's because it's a different kind of book, with an entirely different scope.

[kcshankd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Re-read, some thirty years on. Wonderful new Century Press edition. Some kids get drunk and lout it out, while despoiling rural Spain. It must have been wonderful.

[Genevieve Methot · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

What the hell did I just listen to? Of course, one must remember when this was written but honestly, it’s just an anecdote of a bunch of racist, antisemitic alcoholics who go to Spain. For a book that’s heavily peppered with French and Spanish words, you’d think another narrator would have been chosen. His clunky pronunciation was so painful to listen to.

[regoodrich · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

My problem with this book is the gloomy and depressing tone, with no real objective or purpose for it.

[nagasravika.bodapati · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Sun also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway #books #reviews #classics #1001books My Rating : 4/5 Nice, Nice! A group of young expatriates from America and England travel from Paris to Spain to watch bull racing and bull fighting .. they are all addicted to meaningless enjoyment through constant drinking, traveling, shallow, unrepressed sexual affairs .. their vapid and fatuous lifestyles are exposed, brought to light .. representing a "lost generation" of youngsters after world war 1.

[mykl8s · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very grown up story, that gives us everything we need to know about the characters by what they do, without long paragraphs of explication.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I first read this book several decades ago. What appealed to me then still does appeal to me. Hemingway's use of language is so unique, so compelling. Sparse yet rich, obscure yet revelatory, his writing style is like nothing else I've ever read. If other authors had tackled this particular cast of characters, I would likely have hated the characters and the book. But Hemingway makes these losers (my characterization) sympathetic. You care what happens to them even if you would walk the other way if you met them in real life. His descriptions of a dusty road trip, a drunken fiesta, the dressing of a bullfighter, among many many other scenes just come to life. Yet he uses so few words to describe that life. So I somehow find myself enthralled with a book featuring (mostly) unlikeable characters and something like bullfighting which I find personally repellant. Only an author of remarkable talents could make that happen.

[kslade-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Pretty good novel about bullfighting, romance, etc. in Spain, etc.

[stevesbookstuff · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The debut novel by Ernest Hemingway is arguably the best book he ever wrote. It was an instant bestseller and is today considered probably “the” book of his generation. Published in 1926, between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, it captured the mood of the “Lost Generation”. These were war wounded souls for whom life’s peacetime events seemed insignificant. Many like those in this book stayed behind in Europe and indulged themselves in lives that would have provoked scandal back home. In fact, The Sun Also Rises was considered scandalous by many when published, including Hemingway’s own mother, who reportedly wrote to the author that his was “one of the filthiest books of the year”, and that “every page fills me with sick loathing.”Back then the scandal about the book had to do with its use of swear words and its depiction of “loose morals” in the relationships between the male and female characters. More recently the book has been criticized for the antisemitism and bigotry of its characters - the derogatory language used about the Jewish character Robert Cohn, and the use of both the N word (repeatedly) and the F word - as well as its realistic depiction of bull fighting.The story is told through the eyes of Jake Barnes, an American news reporter in Paris whose war wounds have left him impotent. He is surrounded by a group of friends, American and British. The English Lady Brett Ashley proclaims her love for Jake but given his inability to have sex they both realize they’ll never be more than confidants and close friends. The main action in the book is the result of a love triangle around Brett that plays out on a trip to Pamplona, Spain where the group goes to take part in the Fiesta de San Fermin. They take part in the annual running of the bulls and are daily spectators at the bull fights. There is much drinking and partying.It's clear that Hemingway sees bullfighting as a metaphor for manliness. Jake’s love of bull fighting is in some sense a compensation for his own perceived lack of manliness given his war wounds. He is a true aficionado of bullfighting, and he takes the time to let us know that he's recognized as such by the Spaniards he has befriended in Pamplona. Bullfighting means even more than that to Hemingway, who wrote later that attending a bull fight is like watching a great tragedy - like “having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you.” The tragedy that surrounds the bullfighting in the book mirrors the misadventure that the happy trip of Barnes and his friends becomes. Given that Brett is the epitome of the 1920s New Woman - liberated and promiscuous - it’s not unexpected that she falls for the handsome young bullfighter. This, despite being accompanied by her supposed fiance Michael on the trip to Pamplona and having just completed a dalliance with Robert Cohn. Cohn keeps hanging around though others in the group (especially the would be fiance) repeatedly urge him to just go away. Through it all, even through the fist fight at the climax of the book, Jake remains detached while still a part of events, a reflection of the detachment of his whole lost generation.It's Hemingway’s writing style that makes the book transcend its story of lost souls spending their prime in partying and dissipation. The spareness and understatedness he’s known for is at a peak in this book. It’s a real pleasure to read.When it comes to classics like this it doesn't feel right to assign them a rating (I've thrown a 3 on this LibraryThing review as a "neutral" response hoping not to throw off the average too much). What I will say is that I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading this book and would recommend it highly to anyone who has not yet read it.

[jorgeousjotts · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It makes me want to travel. =)

[completely_melanie · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I understand that this is a classic and to some may be a big deal, but to me this book had no point whatsoever and I found it to be a complete waist of time reading it.

[jbreedlove_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hemingways first published novel was well written with descriptive sense of place and occassional insights, esp. to bullfighting, but I had no sense of lostness of a lost generation, just some drunkards and self-pitying fools who don't appeared to have grown up. Good description of the running of the bulls though. Stited dialogue. The second time I've read it.

[carmenere_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It seems to me readers either love Hemingway or hate him. I tend to be in the love camp and now, after reading The Sun Also Rises, never more so.A group of expatriates, residing in Paris, take a summer vacation in Pamplona to watch Running of the Bulls and enjoy it's 7 days of fiesta. Central to the story are Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. They love each other but because of medical reasons their future together, is just not feasible. So what's there to do but drink and party with your friends. In fact, many of the party members seem confused, unfulfilled and depressed. The result is a bunch of 30 year old adults on spring break, looking for relief in booze and sex. The thing is, this book was written in 1926 and women were thought of very differently so perhaps that's why Hemingway is not a favorite but I appreciate this book for the snapshot in time it provides. He writes of a post WWI world and a generation still coming to terms with the affects of the war. To leverage that he puts Jake and his friend, Bill, on a train and Hemingway's description of the French and Spanish countryside reads like a travelogue. Their sojourn in a small fishing town sounds idyllic and acts as a sharp contrast to the description he provides of the brutal bullfights, they will shortly witness. I enjoyed being a part of this crowd for a short spell but also glad to leave them in their sullen lives.

[occassionalread · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You don't always have to like a novel's protagonists in order to like the novel. It's not that Jake, Brett, Mike, Robert, and Bill are terrible people. But they spend much of their time hurting each other, even while partying together and drinking incessantly. They are flawed and human. All are based on real people Hemingway knew. The novel's action - plot is too structured a word for the action that takes place - is also based on true events. The Sun Also Rises is deservedly heralded as a great modernist novel. Hemingway's short, muscular sentences on display here influenced countless subsequent writers and the writing holds up extremely well, though at times the way people spoke in the 20s reminded me of a black and white James Cagney gangster film, "hey yous guys." I was impressed by some internal dialogue as well, especially a few pages written to reflect Jake's drunken thoughts racing from topic to topic that stood out from most of the other matter of fact descriptions. Even though not entirely likeable, I definitely encourage people to pick up this book and travel to Paris, Bayone, Pamplona, San Sabastian, Burguete with this crew. They're good company. In their 30s they are old enough to have experienced war, jobs, divorce, love, heartbreak, friendship and betrayal. But they are young enough to party hard, and experience life to its fullest, with all the humor and pain and irony and impossiblity that it has to offer.

[gittel_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yeah, Hemingway, so I'm sure its great. I didn't get it.
I feel dumb for not getting it, but I didn't get it.
These characters were a brat pack of annoying spoileds getting drunk and roaming Europe. Read it anyway, because I'm a literary snob and Hemingway was on my literary bucket list. Someone please explain it to me.

[sandrabrower · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

So, I guess with reading this book I am not understanding the genius that they call Ernest Hemingway!

I love his short stories, his poetry and his history which is intriguing in and of itself, but this one... Don't get it. It read to me like a travel blog with a ton of drinking! Disappointed ... I guess I better pick up a copy of The Old Man and the Sea quick!

[amerynth · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I admit I have rather romantic notions of what it would be like to head to 1920's Paris and hobnob with fellow ex-pats (all of whom would be at some stage of writing their book) over Pernod and tiny cafes. Oh, the conversations I envision. Sadly, Hemingway in "The Sun Also Rises" has convinced me I might as well head to a sports bar in Decatur because most of the conversation is pretty dull. I don't typically care for Hemingway (as I find his attitudes toward women, people of color and now Jewish people to be troubling at best) and this book really wasn't an exception -- it was mainly troubling and dull. The book picked up a bit of a spark when it moved to Pamplona and the bar talk revolved around bulls, but at that point, it was really too late to save it.

[bookconcierge · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One of Hemingway’s earliest novels, this was first published in 1926, and has never been out of print since that time. It is loosely based on the author’s own experiences with a circle of friends frequently known as “The Lost Generation.” The novel follows Jake Barnes, an American journalist, and Lady Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman who seems unable to function without a man fawning over her. Together with a group of friends, including Brett’s fiancé, the Scot, Mike Campbell they travel from Paris to Pamplona for the Festival of San Fermin, and the running of the bulls. Along the way more than one man is convinced he loves Brett and can win her affections. The first Hemingway work I read was his The Old Man and the Sea, which was assigned reading when I was in 8th grade. I loved it and have been a fan of Hemingway’s ever since. Still, some of his works fail to resonate with me. And this was one of them.The ennui with which these people live their lives just doesn’t interest me. I am as bored as they seem to be by their own lives. I don’t understand the attraction to Brett, who seems unable to form any lasting relationship but lives for the conquest. Yes, she beautiful and apparently has some money, but men are literally coming to blows over her affections. And Jake? I get that he’s been wounded in WW1, and that has resulted in impotence. I can understand his resultant reserve and reliance on alcohol to dull his emotions. But I just didn’t get the relationship between he and Brett. Or for that matter, his relationship with the other characters. What drew them together? And what kept them connected?I may have liked (or at least appreciated) the novel more had I read rather than listened. I absolutely hated William Hurt’s delivery on the audio. He is a wonderful actor, but in this case he sounded so bored and uninterested. I felt that the pace dragged. He even managed to make the bullfight sound boring. 1* for his performance of the audio.NOTE: The book was published in Britain under the title Fiesta

[dramman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Powerful, vivid book read in 1969, just after living in Spain - Hemmingway's description of Spain and bullfighting resonated strongly.

[toddsherman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”I was looking for something with lots of light—burning sun, baking sand. I was looking for something with a fight in it. I got it with this book, even if I had to wait nearly 130 pages before I got to Spain and longer still, waiting out the seemingly interminable festival week, to witness a bullfight, blood, and thumping fists.The opening is artful misdirection. I thought this would be about Cohn, that he would somehow become a matador, or find his bloody-toothed victory in the sands of the arena. Not so. He does fight. But the moment where he merely takes off his glasses in preparation for a potential punch-up is the most stirring moment of the novel. Hell, the fistfight ?? cool, though, when it happens.The dashing yet respectful bullfighter is a gentleman with a sword, with words, and with his swinging arms. However, just because you can down a maddened bull with a perfectly placed sword thrust doesn’t mean you’ve got the chops to outswing a boxing champion. Different skills, the same passions, a variety of human struggle caught up in the rocket’s confetti. And Cohn, simmering slugger that he is, is no match for a more urbane human—or inconstancy—or a confession of weakness cloaked in drunken braggadocio across the barroom table.I got the sun. I got the fight. All that will undoubtedly work its way into my next novella: ???? ???? ?????. The fact that the inspiration that I gleaned and will most likely pilfer wasn’t exactly what I expected is one of the best gifts that a reader can be granted. I hope to put that same pupil-constricting illumination into my own work.Paris would be cool. But, goddamnit, I want to see the sun in the north of Spain.“I do not know how people could say such terrible things to Robert Cohn. There are people to whom you could not say insulting things. They give you a feeling that the world would be destroyed, would actually be destroyed before your eyes, if you said certain things. But here was Cohn taking it all. Here it was, all going on right before me, and I did not even feel an impulse to try and stop it. And this was friendly joking to what went on later.”

[foof2you · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting story, like most of the so called great books it was so-so. I guess this is the story where the running of the bulls became a thing for Americans to go to. A lot of the prose is unfamiliar in today's world. I found that keeping a dictionary close by was helpful.

[trile1000 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Such a sad and moving tale. Ernest Hemingway's style of writing is so simple and leaves its mark.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well, if the sticker on the front cover can be believed, I bought this book in 1988 for some college course I took. Cost me $4.95. Since I don't remember most of college, I certainly don't remember the class, nor this book. Thankfully, I am a packrat, and look what I found to read in the garage in 2018! I'm glad I did!I really enjoyed this book, and feel like it's the kin to one of my favorites, "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac. Maybe it's the grandfather to it? Anyway, this story features a lost soul in the person of Jake, who we find in Paris, then Spain, then back to Paris again. Along the way we meet Brett, Mike, Bill, and the creepy Robert Cohn. We also learn a lot about food, drink, bullfighting, fishing, France, Spain, and life in general back then. Despite all the moving about, nothing really happens except for life, and I found it totally interesting! I didn't enjoy how mean many of the characters were, nor how strongly the anti-Semitism rang out. But I enjoyed the meandering about, the vivid descriptions of everything, and the general ennui of the characters. A very fine book. Thanks to whatever professor of whatever course I took who required us to read this! It took 30 years, but it hit it's mark!

[ebt1002 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I went back and forth on my rating of this novel several times. It's so easy to see how Hemingway was said to alter the novel, to take the form into new territory. At first, I was underwhelmed: short, choppy sentences and unconvincing dialogue. But as Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley and their companions in Paris and Pamplona developed, as the tensions of fear, loathing, and longing entwined them in adolescent but also sympathetic tenor, I fell under their spell and enjoyed the narrative ride. That Jake and Brett are in love, and that fate has contrived to keep them apart (that is all I'm saying about that so as to avoid spoilers), serve as the primary thematic vehicle for exploring a time and place and a generation devastated by WWI. Racist language and anti-Semitic themes are part of why I struggled with my rating; can I excuse those by pointing to the 1926 publication date? In today's world, I find it harder to make that call. And it hardly feels adequate to "knock off a star" for such. So, I rated the novel for its literary merits as I perceive them without reference to the undertone of bias and discrimination. It's a great novel. And its author and characters are profoundly flawed. That is both the figure and the ground.

[madepercy-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As Hemingway's first novel, it is certainly beyond my comprehension how he could ever understand so much at the age of 27. I am reluctant to disclose too much for fear of spoilers, but the conclusion to the story is very real. The bullfighting is described in ways that make me want to see one, yet simultaneously I am appalled at the thought. Hemingway seems to have felt the same way. He also describes concussion in a way that can only be described by someone who has suffered several concussions. There are no lies in this work. I am becoming accustomed to the meandering first three-quarters of the typical Hemingway plot. It isn't hard work but it isn't gripping either. He seems to lull you into a comfortable sense of normalcy which doesn't end but the last quarter builds and builds to a climax in the last sentence that unfolds the final emotion. With the conclusion to "A Farewell to Arms" I burst into tears. With this novel I exclaimed, "That fucking sucks!" Hemingway's work is seriously brilliant while incredibly timeless. I am not sure whether it is simply cultural alignment or not, but the connection between the pedestrian and the nostalgic intertwined with the exotic European setting connects one's past to Hemingway's past to the power of two. He takes you to the place he has been and then where he is in the story. I am convinced this is the result of his technique of writing as the protagonist in the first person while excising, completely, the presence of the narrator. Brilliant stuff!

[browner56 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ernest Hemingway led a legendary life, becoming well known for his many passions including game hunting, fishing, serving in wars, producing fiction, womanizing, drinking, traveling, and even his suicide. However, he also began his writing career working as a newspaper reporter. That is an important detail when considering his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, because above all else that book is a roman à clef relating a fictionalized account of real events that happened to actual people. Of course, Hemingway himself was one of those people, which is where his reporting skills came in handy when turning the account into a full-length story.The tale is set in the mid-1920s and follows an aimless group of expatriates as they travel from Paris to Spain for the Fiesta of San Fermín in Pamplona. These people represent the so-called Lost Generation, those men and women who came of age in the aftermath of World War I and had been so scarred by the experience to have lost all hope and sense of purpose in life. So, they spend their days in drunken and frequently mean-spirited debauchery, trying desperately to outrun their pain. That they never manage to achieve that goal is perhaps the most poignant moral of the book.It is also worth noting the stylistic achievement that Hemingway introduced with this novel. The story is written in what one reviewer of the day called “lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame”. Indeed, the descriptions are simple and terse and the dialogue seldom exceeds a single sentence spoken at a time. But, through that spare prose, the symbolism and meaning are crystal clear and quite affecting. These are not pleasant people that Hemingway writes about—including himself, if truth be told—but they become unforgettable characters, if only for the suffering they cause and the lack of purpose they experience.I should say that The Sun Also Rises is not my favorite Hemingway book. In fact, it is not even my favorite early work of the author; I found stories such as “Big Two-Hearted River” and “The End of Something” from In Our Time to be simply stunning and far more satisfying to read. Still, this novel remains standing on its own merit almost a century after its publication. Beyond that, though, it also serves as a remarkable road map to the people who lived in a time and place that truly is becoming lost to a modern generation of readers.

[buffalogr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Classic novel -- emasculated WWI veteran finds himself in Paris with others of the lost generation. I kept drawing parallels to the children of the 60s, similar, I thought. Characters well developed as always. Papa did good in this novel. My first Hemingway novel in this decade, I'll read some more.

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I still love the way Hemingway writes, but I'm docking this a star because the portrayal of Brett Ashley feels so dated. Yes, I recognize this book was written 90 years ago. But I found Brett grating enough that it spoiled the reading experience.

[dottieph · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Although Hemingway has great talent in writing conversational prose, I found this novel very boring. How many drinks can one have in one story? Bet this novel has the record!

[jennysbookbag.com · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'm just not a Hemingway fan. I must be in the minority because I see that a lot of people love his work.