The Sun Also Rises

After watching Midnight in Paris Saturday, I was struck with the desire to reread some Hemingway, specifically The Sun Also Rises since there is reference to Zelda going off with a bullfighter in one of the scenes.  I got it on Kindle Sunday, and I finished the reread just now.

I guess I haven't read it in two or three years now, not since I took that course in Hemingway where we read all his works together.  I had forgotten so much of it.  I know that the last time I read it I didn't respond to it as I did this time.  There was something in it this time that hit just like a ten-pound sledge.

Maybe it's that I'm older now, and I have seen more of the nastiness people are capable of dishing out to each other as they are scrabbling to fill the empty spaces inside them.  Maybe that same aspect has allowed me to come to a place where I know a Brett, a Cohn, a Mike.  Perhaps when I was younger, I thought these people unrealistic.  I seem to remember my students saying something like that when we studied it together.  They're wrong, though.  I think that Hemingway has captured types fairly well.  Maybe we were all just too young to have encountered them yet.  I see horrible shadows of myself at times in Jake, willing to give up my own happiness for the happiness of the one I love and suffering because of it.

As for Hemingway's prose, I love it more now than I did even a few years ago.  I am not one of those people who say that his style is the only way to go, but perhaps because I do deal with developing writing so often (and you can consider that a euphemism if you like), I find the stripped-down sharpness in TSAR like a minimalist painting or traditional Japanese architecture, good because it is clean and strong, powerful because there is nothing to detract from its focus.

I have been rereading The Great Gatsby off and on routinely for years, but for some reason, TSAR hasn't been in on that rotation.  The last time I left it, I did not have this feeling of bittersweet love for it.  It might have been because I was teaching it at a stressful time.  Sometimes that colors a work for me.  For whatever reason, and for whatever reason my feelings toward this work have changed, I suspect this will now be one I go to more often.

(This is not to say that I love all Hemingway.  I still hate Catherine with a passion.  She doesn't get off that easily.  I can't forgive any woman who apologizes for the inconvenience of her own death or any writer who creates her.)