The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, included on The 100 Best Novels list compiled by the Modern Library https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/ - Nine out of 10

 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, included on The 100 Best Novels list compiled by the Modern Library https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

Nine out of 10

 

 

The under signed has read The Sun Also Rises and for some mysterious reasons he has set aside for further enjoyment, only when taken up again over the past days, the elation that he has felt the first time has dissipated, unless of course, there are less distinct happenings at play, such as the fact that we change and though the novel stays the same, our understanding (or incomprehension) has modified the events, characters we encounter and we re-create the narrative in our own minds, which are not our own anymore…

 

Marcel Proust is the greatest author for this reader and he claims in his glorious Magnum opus, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/08/le-cote-de-guermantes-by-marcel-proust.html  that we become different people over the years, and the individual that looks at the same phenomenon, incident after years (it does take years, for we do not change in minutes, albeit there are dramatic moments that can alter everything, time being relative, minutes can be years and vice versa) will be the same ‘man, woman, non-gender’ but at the same time, they will have been transformed beyond recognition.

In as much, The Sun Also Rises – and with it other works, initially labeled as masterpieces, that will get a drubbing on the second encounter…alas, a troubling perspective, for there are a good number of resplendent chefs d’oeuvre, stored away on goodreads for further euphoric meetings, that may suffer the same fate, among them White Man Falling by Mike Stocks http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/10/white-man-falling-by-mike-stocks-ten.html, a stupendous comedy that had yours truly in stiches and may fall flat next year, when it is to be lifted from the reading plan…Insha’Allah!

 

The fact is that there are other explanations for the coldness with which The Sun Also Rises has been welcomed under this roof, one being that Hemingway has never been a favorite of mine, his major opera, A Farewell to Arms http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/04/77-out-of-100-for-farewell-to-arms.html , having failed to impress this (facetious, preposterous) reader, who has been more enthusiastic when taking in the short stories of the big hunter, and that is another reason to keep the distance…

Indeed, one of the characters in The Sun Also Rises is more interested to travel to British (at the time) East Africa to hunt big animals, where the short stories are mostly taking place, when he is prompted to sail to South America by another personage…the reply is ‘you can meet all the real South Americans you want in Paris’…there are outré statements about the City of Light, that is rejected by Georgette (a prostitute in the language of that day) as being dirty, something which may make one think of Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard Professor and luminary Daniel Gilbert, who explains how we tend to think we will be happy if only we were to live in California, Paris or some other supposedly miraculous place, but when we get to live there, things, perspectives change http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/06/stumbling-on-happiness-by-david-gilbert.html

 

If I am to look at what happened to the elation felt when reading The Sun Also Rises for the first time, then an ‘alert’ would be necessary (though this looks futile, for modesty and common sense would indicate that few, if any will have reached this point, and those who are still here, find this amusing, ludicrous or something else, but in no case take the text seriously) in that it looks by now that little, if any attention will be paid to the novel ‘recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and all the effort will be engaged  for self-exploration.

Was there any exuberance, or is just a ‘myth’, a false memory, maybe it has to do with finding more about Ernest Hemingway from the fabulous Intellectuals by Paul Johnson

http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/intellectuals-by-paul-johnson.html in which Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and quite a few others show us the inglorious side of their personalities, the ugliness of their character that does not appear in their magnificent works, or at least we had assumed that whenever we have monsters coming out from the pages, they somehow had models in the world, and they did not exit from the depths of the writer that is now discredited to some extent.

 

People have discussed this issue and we can take this intransigence too far – Bill Maher, or was it someone else, mentioned this in his comedy show about Michael Jackson, who seems to be confirmed as something of a perverse individual (there is a documentary in which adults that have been children, counterintuitively, invited at the pop star’s Magic World castle and Play Land only to be abused, talk about their trauma) but has some enjoyable songs…what do you do, delete them, or listen to the music.

The answer might be found in Aristotle, and the use of the Golden Mean Rule, whereby we do eliminate the most awful offenders and keep an open mind for less appalling transgressions and classic works of humanity, we could not trash War and Peace, though some have tried and will keep at it, even if Tolstoy had some very nasty ideas…as for Ernest Hemingway, the trouble is that he was not only enthusiastic about coridas, but we find them in The Sun Also Rises (and elsewhere in his books)

 

Yes, it is stupid to refuse to accept the magnificence of a novel on account of passages that make one cringe, feel terrible, but it should be noted that if the reader is an amateur and looks for fiction as a way to be happier, escape the world of Trump, Bolsanaro, Putin, Xi and the other multitude of ghouls, then he can be excused if he tries to find the joy distilled in Lucky Jim by divine Kingsley Amis

http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/05/lucky-jim-by-kingsley-amis.html and stay away from horror, madness or the ugly killing of horses, bulls and people in Pamplona, described in this novel, and the attitude towards corridas can be understood – we have had a teacher of art who explained that it is better, more honorable, beautiful, perhaps glorious for a bull to die in the arena, with thousands of spectators, than in an abattoir – but not necessarily embraced…the latter happens to be the stance of yours truly…