Download Fiesta (Arrow Classic) eBook

One of my favorite novels. Always in my top five lists of all time. The novel that I have probably read the most times. Hemingway is what I like to call a "thinking man's author." Unless you are willing to think beyond the written word you will never fully appreciate the brilliance of Mr. Hemingway. In "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms"(not to mention his great short stories) this concept of thinking beyond the written word is most prevalent and most masterfully displayed. Every single character in "The Sun Also Rises"is a mystery and, after finishing the novel, one is left thinking "I wonder what happened next to that character."

Lady Ashley is my favorite female character in all of literature. She is real, uncompromising, and yet a mystery to the very end. She is a siren with a heart or maybe without a heart?

Hemingway, unlike such great authors as Lawrence, Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy and Fitzgerald, could describe a scene, a setting, using half the words that these wonderful writers would use and yet be as poignant and vivid as any writer I have ever read. His descriptions of the bull fights at Pamplona and the fiesta are chilling and as splendid as anything I have had the pleasure to read.

Tomorrow, July 2, marks the day Hemingway died. He once said, "The only thing a person takes with him when he dies, is what he left behind" and in his case he left behind brilliant novels and masterful short stories that never fail to amaze and astonish me.

The Sun Also Rises is one of my all-time favorite novels. Gertrude Stein referred to Hemingway and his contemporaries as the Lost Generation, and this novel in particular exudes what she meant by that. I think that's also why this novel still resonates today - what generation isn't lost? There are so many quotes that are apropos, but I'll leave you with this one - "Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that."

What more to say about a classic that changed the way we think about the novel and writing and narrative itself? For all its brawl and sharp talk, its drinks and bullfights, notice how some significant scenes occur "off camera," and are related to us only second hand (we never see Cohn beat up Brett's matador lover, we don't see Brett with Cohn when they go off for their love jaunt) but we do learn about it at the same time Jake Barnes - the protagonist - does. Note also that for all of his sexual incapacity (from the war) Jake is able to "pleasure" Brett, if you read carefully. The idea of a hero who is sexually impotent yet in the eye of a sexual storm has its own particular flavor. The tough noir novels that followed and derived from Hemingway (Chandler) owe much to witty repartee and cynical responses to pain and losing the girl. I would almost call this a comic novel if it didn't have darker overtones. Wit and humor are present in nearly every chapter -as if Hemingway wants to tell us something else. As for the hard drinking I am sure some Ph.D. has estimated just how many liters of alcohol flow through the book and how many ccs of alcohol flow through the characters' veins. For those who read this when they were in high school and wondered what the fuss was about, a reread is worth it, keeping in mind how different his writing is to so much of what we read today, the short sentence, the absence of adjectives and adverbs, and the fact that the author almost never enters the minds of his characters but lets the reader infer everything from what is seen and "dialogued." As for the Kindle version, I found no typos or joined words that are sometimes the problem with "kindle'd" books. Much criticism exists on the internet about the "meaning" and the subtext of the book and reading around the text itself does help enrich the experience. That with this writing style, Hemingway shut the door on sentimentality, that his style is hard-boiled, that Hemingway learned from Ezra Pound to "distrust adjectives." In a future book (Death in the Afternoon) he explains his "iceberg" theory of writing: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." Keeping things out causes a pressure on what is left in and the reader can sense and "intuit" the rest of the story.

If one were taking a course on "The American Novel in the 20th Century", I'm sure Hemingway would be featured prominently. However, for pure reading enjoyment, "The Sun Also Rises" falls flat. We meet a cast of characters that are tedious, scheming and wholly unlikable. We are then presented with a story that is little more than the characters doing a few things in between extended bouts of drinking. This is simply another Hemingway exercise in "manly men", chasing "confused women" during the years between wars. I've never been particularly taken by his celebrated style of sparse writing. For depth of character, give me Steinbeck. For richness of story, Faulkner. And for artful concision, I'll take Vonnegut. Hemingway has, and should have, lost his place among relative American writers of the 20th century.

let us be as concise and frugal with words when reviewing Hemingway as he was in writing this novel. Yes a masterpiece which greatest charm is that EH came as close to writing a verse novel as we shall see in our time. It is almost poetry and that is why the book stands well after multiple readings.

This edition has included sections that Eh had excised from the book and their greatest worth is that it shows how difficult is was for the author to write an an apparently simple manner. One can never go wrong when experiencing the work of a master. An aside, if you want to get a laugh or a scare about the fate of literary culture read some of the 1 and 2 star reviews. Talk about casting pearls before swines!