The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises (1926) -
Author: Ernest Hemingway

Meet Jake Barnes: working journalist, expatriate, tough talker, tragic hero. Jake was horribly wounded in the war—in fact, he was effectively gelded—so he spends his time in Paris getting drunk in cafes, nursing his ennui, bantering with his hard-boiled friends, and mooning over his unconsummatable love for a beautiful, aristocratic Englishwoman named Bret Ashley who dines on men three meals a day. This doomed pair, plus a lively cast of romantically reckless expatriates, head to Pamplona for the annual fiesta, where they drink vast amounts of wine, hook up, betray one another, and try to forget the caverns of loss and emptiness that gape inside them. The Sun Also Rises popularized the idea of the "Lost Generation"—but the anomie and disappointment at its heart seem to come around for every generation, sooner or later.—L.G.

From the TIME Archive:

"While Hemingway's writing has acquired only a few affectations, his interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy cafe tables in the so-called Latin quarter of Paris"

THE SUN ALSO RISES—Ernest Hemingway—Scribner.

A lot of people expected a big novel from burly young Author Hemingway. His short work (In Ou Time, 1925) bit deeply into life. He said things naturally, calmly tersely, accurately. He wrote only; about things he had experienced mostly outdoors, as a doctor's son in northern Michigan and as a self-possessed young tramp in Europe. Philosophically his implication was: "Life's great. Don't let it rattle you."

Now his first novel is published and while his writing has acquired only a few affectations, his interests appear to have grown soggy with much sitting around sloppy cafe tables in the so-called Latin (it should be called American) quarter of Paris. He has chosen to immortalize the semi-humorous love tragedy of an insatiable young English War widow and an unmanned U. S. soldier. His title is borrowed from Ecclesiastes; his motto about "a lost generation, is from Gertrude Stein; his widow Lady Brett Ashley, from Michael Arlen's Green Hat. She is repeatedly called "a nice piece," and "a good chap." She has a grim wit and not a shred of reticence The hero failing, her other men ar many, including a Princeton Jew and a Spanish bullfighter. The story, such as it is, comes from the eunuch, Jake, who is very generous, patient, clever and, of course very sad.

The picture of cosmopolitan castaways going to prizefights, bars bedrooms, bullrings in France and Spain is excessively accurate but not as trite as it might be. The ironic witticisms are amusing, for a few chapters. There is considerable emotion, consciously restrained quite subtle. Experts may pronounce the book a masterpiece of sex-frustration psychology. But the reader is very much inclined to echo a remark that is one of Jake's favorites and, presumably Author Hemingway's too, "Oh, what the hell!"