It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
I’m not going to claim that this quote perfectly sums up Hemingway’s first novel, because if I did, you would know everything already and there would be no point in reading it, and in a strange display of understanding on my part for Hemingway, I want you to read it. I am, however, going to say that it’s a very succinct quote that is quite representational of most of the characters: lifeless and mechanical on the surface and displaced and tormented underneath. I’d have to say that the duality each character possesses is the strength of the book—the way everyone’s pain is so hidden but so accessible, so very human.
This is my second time reading Hemingway, the first being A Farewell to Arms a little over two years ago. My impression then was that the book was a monumental waste of my time: I saw what was coming, the characters had little to offer me, and everything just felt very tedious. I’m not sure if I would feel that way again on a second read, as The Sun Also Rises felt quite similar at times, but overall it just left me cold. This, however, had me intrigued from the start. It still felt like I could have been unconscious for several parts during the book and missed nothing—sort of like it just trudged along at a steady, automatic pace—but every so often there was something that caught my eye, mostly involving a sudden revelation of character depth that was somehow more rewarding than it is in most books, most likely because it happened so sporadically.
Hemingway’s technique elicits a multitude of reactions from me—mainly fascination, annoyance, and boredom. It’s certainly an easy read in the sense that there aren’t laborious, multi-clause sentences or narrative devices that require a lot of concentration, but that doesn’t necessarily make it an easy book: as aforementioned, there’s a lot to pick up on, especially with the characters. As a writer, there were a few interesting things I noticed that are somewhat unique to Hemingway, one of which being the way dialogue is arranged. I found it strangely effective that, in groups of three or more speakers, the tagless dialogue was hard to pinpoint. It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter who was speaking, so long as those words were being said. I’ve never thought of attempting anything of the sort, having always been a believer in well-paced and clearly-assigned dialogue, and I probably wouldn’t try to incorporate it into my own writing, but it’s an interesting distinction.
In the end, I can say that I’ve definitely had a change of heart where Hemingway is concerned. Before I was mostly certain that his work wasn’t worth my time, but this book has proved me wrong. If there’s anyone else out there who is feeling on the fence about this particular author and you haven’t read his first major work, it might be worth doing so, even if you still end up on the critical side.
Ernest Hemingway at Wikipedia | The Sun Also Rises at Wikipedia
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