Ernest Hemingway is very quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, and I couldn't be more happy about it! Though I want to save some of his books for later down my Best 100 list, I'm glad that I went back to him for The Sun Also Rises so that I could be familiar with the story for our evening at the ballet.
In short, I enjoyed this novel. Though Hemingway's writing style tends to be terse yet nuanced, I thought that his prose in this particular novel was more fluid than in A Farewell to Arms. This brought me into Jake and Brett's world more quickly than anticipated, and while it was still true to Hemingway's trademark style, I do think it has a different feel to it than other books.
Part of the reason why I love novelists like Fitzgerald is because of the allure of the Jazz Age. Champagne, dancing, traveling, money-- they're all part of the magical lifestyle that many of his characters live in. It's easy to slip into the glamorous dreamlife of Gatsby and idealize that era. What Hemingway has done, however, particularly in The Sun Also Rises, is remind us that party must at some point come to an end. Those wild parties where the alcohol flows like water start to feel uneasily out of control. The characters struggle with hangovers, go to bed feeling ill, and Lady Brett Ashley is purported to be an alcoholic. Even the frivolous spending is revealed to be mindless, as the characters ignore their bankruptcy and rack up debts. This is not a whispy, lovely daydream in West Egg-- this is the reality of people who drink too much, spend too much, and end up alone.
As uncomfortable as that reality is, Hemingway still manages to infuse beauty amidst the tragedy. The simple moments like fishing in the countryside, away from the raucous cities and belligerent relationships, are the moments of true peace. The scenes where Jake and Bill split up to fish in the river are endearing, yet it also stuck out to me that Jake only finds calm when alone. Keeping that in mind, it might be okay that Jake will not be with Brett. Though maybe a bit lonely, he's also at peace when away from others. Maybe, we can hope, Jake will be okay in the end. Maybe he can keep dreaming, and maybe Brett will spin herself into oblivion, but maybe he will be okay.
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2. "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov
13. "1984," George Orwell
18. "Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut
31. "Animal Farm," George Orwell
41. "Lord of the Flies," William Golding
64. "The Catcher in the Rye," J. D. Salinger
88. "The Call of the Wild," Jack London
***
100 Best Novels
1. "Ulysses," James Joyce
5. "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley
6. "The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner
7. "Catch-22," Joseph Heller
8. "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler
9. "Sons and Lovers," D. H. Lawrence
10. "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck
11. "Under the Volcano," Malcolm Lowry
12. "The Way of All Flesh," Samuel Butler
14. "I, Claudius," Robert Graves
15. "To the Lighthouse," Virginia Woolf
16. "An American Tragedy," Theodore Dreiser
17. "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," Carson McCullers
19. "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison
20. "Native Son," Richard Wright
21. "Henderson the Rain King," Saul Bellow
22. "Appointment in Samarra," John O' Hara
23. "U.S.A." (trilogy), John Dos Passos
24. "Winesburg, Ohio," Sherwood Anderson
25. "A Passage to India," E. M. Forster
27. "The Ambassadors," Henry James
29. "The Studs Lonigan Trilogy," James T. Farrell
30. "The Good Soldier," Ford Madox Ford
32. "The Golden Bowl," Henry James
33. "Sister Carrie," Theodore Dreiser
34. "A Handful of Dust," Evelyn Waugh
35. "As I Lay Dying," William Faulkner
36. "All the King's Men," Robert Penn Warren
37. "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," Thornton Wilder
38. "Howards End," E. M. Forster
39. "Go Tell It on the Mountain," James Baldwin
40. "The Heart of the Matter," Graham Greene
42. "Deliverance," James Dickey
43. "A Dance to the Music of Time" (series), Anthony Powell
44. "Point Counter Point," Aldous Huxley
45. "The Sun Also Rises," Ernest Hemingway
46. "The Secret Agent," Joseph Conrad
47. "Nostromo," Joseph Conrad
48. "The Rainbow," D. H. Lawrence
49. "Women in Love," D. H. Lawrence
50. "Tropic of Cancer," Henry Miller
52. "Portnoy's Complaint," Philip Roth
53. "Pale Fire," Vladimir Nabokov
54. "Light in August," William Faulkner
55. "On the Road," Jack Kerouac
56. "The Maltese Falcon," Dashiell Hammett
57. "Parade's End," Ford Madox Ford
58. "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton
59. "Zuleika Dobson," Max Beerbohm
60. "The Moviegoer," Walker Percy
61. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," Willa Cather
62. "From Here to Eternity," James Jones
63. "The Wapshot Chronicles," John Cheever
65. "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess
66. "Of Human Bondage," W. Somerset Maugham
67. "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad
68. "Main Street," Sinclair Lewis
69. "The House of Mirth," Edith Wharton
70. "The Alexandria Quartet," Lawrence Durrell
71. "A High Wind in Jamaica," Richard Hughes
72. "A House for Ms. Biswas," V. S. Naipaul
73. "The Day of the Locust," Nathaniel West
75. "Scoop," Evelyn Waugh
77. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce
78. "Kim," Rudyard Kipling
79. "A Room With a View," E. M. Forster
80. "Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh
81. "The Adventures of Augie March," Saul Bellow
82. "Angle of Repose," Wallace Stegner
83. "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul
84. "The Death of the Heart," Elizabeth Bowen
85. "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad
86. "Ragtime," E. L. Doctorow
87. "The Old Wives' Tale," Arnold Bennett
89. "Loving," Henry Green
90. "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie
91. "Tobacco Road," Erskine Caldwell
92. "Ironweed," William Kennedy
93. "The Magus," John Fowles
94. "Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys
95. "Under the Net," Iris Murdoch
96. "Sophie's Choice," William Styron
97. "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles
98. "The Postman Always Rings Twice," James M. Cain
99. "The Ginger Man," J. P. Donleavy
100. "The Magnificent Ambersons," Booth Tarkington
