The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway, Ernest

ISBN 10: 0684718081 / ISBN 13: 9780684718088

Published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1970

About this Item

Illustrated wraps with black and white lettering. Rubbing to corners, spine shows reader's creasing and rubbing head and heel. Text shows a handful of margin notes with yellow highlighter. Text is evenly tanned. Great cover art by James and Ruth McCrea. "An absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heart-breaking narrative. It is a truly gripping story, tod in lean, hard, athletic prose, magnificent writing, filled with organic action which gives a compelling picture of character." (NY Times review).

Seller Inventory # D110325

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Sun Also Rises
• Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York
• Publication Date: 1970
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684718081
• ISBN 13: 9780684718088
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: James and Ruth McCrea
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction/General

About this title

Synopsis

In the socially dislocated period after World War I, an American expatriate and a British peeress conduct a hopeless love affair

Review

The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.

Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.

But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin