“Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bull-fighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926
The Sun Also Rises has the kind of unpolished verve and crackling incandescence that your favorite band’s first album had, before they were aware of their unique formula. It’s an incredible debut novel; Hemingway before he was Hemingway.
Desire, in The Sun Also Rises, is the nihilistic Mobius strip of Ecclesiastes, infinite rivers running into perpetually thirsty seas.
Jake is one of many disaffected Americans living in France after WWI. He’s in love with Brett, as are an assortment of other expatriates. She’s in love with most of them, though not all at once. Jake is always moving, gazing through windows, wishing he was on the other side, restless when he gets there. He longs for authenticity and connection when he’s alone but is carried along by tides of circumstance and the whims of his friends when he’s not. He reads about bullfighters, in awe of a life fully lived, and travels circuitously to the epicenter of bull-running country only to remain a spectator.
People have said this book is about the lost generation who felt the world was irreparably broken after WWI, but I didn’t get that out of it. This book could be written today. I know these people. Hell, I am these people. The Eternally Yearning, hungry for imagined lives in other towns at other parties eating other meals experiencing other things then sleeping in other beds.
The Lost Generation, the Beat Generation, the Me Generation, the MTV Generation, the Instagram Generation. Maybe someone else, some new experience, some new sensation, will complete them.
The wind whirls continually, and returns to where it started.