The Sun Also Rises

No, this is not a blog to cheer myself up about the soon-to-disappear Sun here in the western part of Oregon :)  And, yes, it is about Ernest Hemingway's novel.

It was simply wonderful.  It was so refreshing a writing style to encounter after getting flooded by the emotion-laden long paragraphs in Invisible Man.  The short sentences, particularly to describe the intensity of emotions felt by the characters, must have been quite revolutionary in literature for the time period that this was written. But then, I am biased--I have always preferred short stories to novels, and short sentences over the multi-line sentences in Charles Dickens' works!

However, one issue bothered me.  Hemingway seemed to have been intent on making sure that the reader knew fully well that the character Robert Cohn is Jewish. Well, Hemingway doesn't use "Jewish" but always writes "Jew."  After a while, and particularly when something negative was said about Cohn, I wasn't sure why it had to pointed out so many times.  Was this something consistent with the way Jewish characters were written about in that time period?  But, even if so, given that Hemingway was writing in his "Heminway" style, he could have avoided that repeated characterization.  Similarly, there is something about the way he refers to a "nigger" boxer that didn't seem quite right.  The "Jew" and then the "nigger" together ... as much as I loved the novel, I am curious now about Hemingway's feelings about the world other than White Christians ...

I did like the protagonist--Jake Barnes.  There is a sense of idealism underneath his very realistic approach, and that gives life and color to the character.  An enormous sense of optimism comes through in that character, which is not to be seen in the others--definitely not in Robert Cohn, nor in the main female character, Lady Brett Ashley.  To quite an extent, Barnes personifies the idea of America itself, particularly given the contexts of the story of American and British expats in France and Spain.  There is America the ideal--freedom and happiness and all that, and the America that is so pragmatic that is all about taking care of your own yard and to heck with everything and everybody else.  Barnes has this in him.

It was neat, therefore, to end the summer readings with a piece of American literature that conveys a sense of pragmatic idealism, how much ever of an oxymoron that is.  Am glad I didn't end with Invisible Man, which left me down and depressed, and angry and furious too.

BTW, a few years ago, Wired ran an interesting contest for short stories--along the lines of the shortest story that Hemingway wrote:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Hemingway apparently called it his best work.