Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. Vintage, 2000; first published as The Sun Also Rises in 1926 (in the US); 1927 in Britain with the title Fiesta
The central character in Fiesta, Hemingway’s first full novel, is the American expat journalist Jake Barnes. Book 1 shows him hanging around Paris bars and restaurants in the Latin Quarter and elsewhere popular with the other American and British expats and travellers. They drink a lot, flirt and talk in that distinctive Hemingway style: clipped, laconic, smart. I’ve posted before about his famous ‘iceberg’ literary technique: showing just the smallest tip of the substance of what he’s writing about. In Fiesta it becomes tedious.
Jake goes fishing in the Basque country with a friend. They catch fish. They were good fish (forgive the unflattering bad pastiche of Hemingway’s pared-back prose style). Then they go to the San Fermín fiesta in Pamplona (hence the title). This gives Jake the opportunity to brag about being an aficionado of bullfighting. There’s more than one could wish for about the corrida (the running of the bulls), which ones are good bulls, which bullfighters are good.
He’s with a motley collection of friends, several Americans and a seductive socialite English tomboy divorcée, Lady Brett Ashley. She’s a New Woman femme fatale, over whom all the ‘chaps’ (one of her favourite words) fall out, as they all desire her. They drink even more heavily than they did in Paris, fight and vie with each other to show which of the men is the most macho.
There’s some unsavoury antisemitism about one of the group, a Jewish man called Robert Cohn, who’s also obsessively enamoured of Brett.
Brett is the most interesting character. Jake is also in love with her, but their future as a couple is doomed, partly because, although this is never spelt out, he has a wound sustained in World War I that has rendered him impotent.
What’s it all about then? The epigraph cites Gertrude Stein’s depiction of this post-war generation as ‘lost’. These characters are all dissolute, self-indulgent, no doubt as a collective reaction to the horrors of the war years. Same with the women like Brett; now it’s time to cut loose and live life to the full. Hence their preference for ‘fiesta’ rather than mundane life with its responsibilities and wars.
Jake is different in one respect; he’s the only one who seems to have a job and to work for a living. Does he represent the puritanical American work ethic, at odds with the decadence of many young Americans and Europeans at the time? If so, it’s a message J.D. Vance would endorse. That’s not something that endears me to the novel.
I couldn’t muster enough interest to try to fathom it all. I thought these characters were just too unattractive and selfish to care anything about, and the prose style way too macho and mannered. As I said at the end of my previous post about Virginia Woolf, what a contrast with the subtle, layered style and compelling content of her near contemporary novel Jacob’s Room (published just four years before Fiesta).
I like Hemingway but I’ve never read this one because of the bullfighting, and *chuckle* your review doesn’t tempt me to read it now…
I can admire the minimalist style from an aesthetic pov, but I can’t bear all that male chest beating. When we were in Ronda recently we visited the bullring museum exhibition; interesting to see that bullfighting was banned for a time in the 19C, but not because of cruelty to animals, but because the matadors were committing a crime against Catholicism by risking their lives – like a kind of ritualised potential suicide.
So interesting to read a male author in tandem with a female author. I have a friend who is just now reading Moby Dick alongside Mrs. Dalloway but – as if there needs to be a “but”-she’s noting the interiority present in both books. Nothing interior with Hemingway, is there! He’s more stereotypically “objective” as a male writer. He’s outside all the action- an ex-pat with no need to understand the history of the country he ends up in, a misogynist with no compunction to understand women, and an antisemitic with no interest in learning about the Jewish experience- particularly with respect to the way masculinity has been interpreted in the culture. I can’t stand Hemingway! I much prefer Fitzgerald.
I chose this partly because of it coinciding with a trip to Andalucia, and also for a contrast with the very different approach of V Woolf. Colm Tóibín’s introduction praises the EH ‘iceberg’ technique highly, but I don’t find it works with the subject matter: all that bragging, drinking and slaughter of bulls. Attitudes to women and Jews are repugnant, too. OK, so we make allowances for other times, other mores – but there are limits. It seemed to me too that the Jake character (ie EH) was very smug about his fluency in French and Spanish, and his acceptance in Pamplona in particular by the bullfighting aficionados. It was all about him, not the culture he portrays from the outside. Any insight is into his masculinity, not the people he’s with. Apart from maybe Brett, who is presented in a slightly more complex way. But there’s something nasty about Jake’s reaction to her rejection of him.
I saw a photograph recently of Hemingway and his crew, including Duff Twysden, the model for Lady Brett Ashley in Pamplona and I think I should overcome my aversion to bull fighting and give this a go; ‘tedious’ is probably just how I’ll find it too!
I’ve seen that picture, too. We’re just back from a trip with friends in Malaga and spent a couple of nights in Ronda, right next to the famous bullring. This novel seemed an appropriate choice for that location. Although on one level I can appreciate EH is doing something interesting stylistically and technically, I just don’t care for that machismo, boasting, misogyny and racism. And I certainly don’t like bullfighting.
Interesting review, Simon! I’ve not read any of Hemingway’s fiction as far as I recall and I certainly don’t feel the need to after your review. I’ll stick to Woolf!
Woolf has the advantage of making you feel after reading her books that you have grown in some way. EH leaves me feeling grubby and cross.
Since I really, really hate Hemingway — the man as well as his literary output — I enjoyed your review very much. In full disclosure, however, Sun is the one Hemingway novel that I (very) mildly enjoyed. What can I say in my defense? That I was barely twenty when I read it and the faux romanticism appealed? That it was required reading in my literature class? That it was actually rather refreshing compared to the other selections? Whatever. I’ve never been tempted to revisit. In the highly unlikely event I should do so, I suspect my reaction would be very similar to yours!
I think the reader’s response to this novel has more to do with the reader’s own experience and outlook on life than the merits or otherwise of the book. There are good books by unpleasant people (Larkin? Pound?). But I don’t think this is a particularly good book by an unpleasant man. I can see that it might impress a young person – it has a swaggering contempt for social norms, and a strong sense of Jake’s feeling that the world is unfair to him. Hell is other people.
Very good points, Simon! I had actually forgotten that there was another Hemingway work that I rather enjoyed: A Moveable Feast, his “memoir” (I suspect, perhaps unjustly, that it was quite fictionalized in spots) of life among the artsy-expat set in 1920s Paris. I actually read that one twice, last time two/three decades ago. Poor little Zelda F came off very badly, as I recall (ditto for F. Scott). But then, what are memoirs for, if not to settle old scores?
One of my earliest posts here was on A Moveable Feast. There’s a link here to part 1 of 2:
https://tredynasdays.co.uk/2013/09/ernest-hemingway-moveable-feast-review-part/
It is interesting, rather better I think than the fiction.
I agree that reading a book is a dialogue, a dance between book and reader. We’ve all- I think? Re-read books and have found them completely different each time we read them- based on who we were when we read them. I’m fascinated by translation in this way- the reader who translates writes a different book from the original. I would love to see a discussion here about the role – or the effects of-translation in this context. How can we know a book? How do we know a book? Thank you for the observations about Catholicism and bull fighting. Fascinating!
Nora: nice image – a dance is dead right. I often find on looking at a book for a second time that I see a very different text. As for translation: I recall the old saying in Italian, traduttore traitor – the translator as traitor. But a good translation creates perhaps a similar but different version of of the original. As for poetry – another maxim, I forget from whom, was that poetry is what can’t be translated. I don’t read a great deal of fiction in translation, but enjoy being able to at least get an inkling of what the original was like when I don’t know the language well enough to read the original. I don’t know if you are aware of a literary blog by a Canadian lit professor, Rohan Maitzen, it’s called Novel Readings; she specialises in Victorian lit, especially G Eliot, but has some interesting posts on all kinds of literary topics, including, if I remember correctly, translation (but I might well be misremembering). Thanks for stopping by again and taking the time to comment.
Interesting, I’ve never really wanted to read him and you’ve given me permission not to: thank you!
I studied A Farewell to Arms for A level many years ago, and my teenage self quite liked it. I think it was much less oppressively macho than this one, though there is a potentially true love story lurking in it beneath all the boozy bluster.