The Sun Also Rises

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. Published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises was hailed by The New York Times as "a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic prose that puts more literary English to shame". With this bold debut novel, Hemingway established his reputation as the chronicler of the "lost generation" of American expatriates living in Paris in the 1920s. At the heart of the action are the narrator Jake Barnes, whose tough front belies a profound vulnerability, and Lady Brett Ashley, who embodies the sexually liberated new woman of the period. In pursuit of an impossible relationship with her, Jake seeks solace in male camaraderie and in the restorative power of nature. From the cosmopolitan French capital, imbued with the transgressive spirit of the jazz age, the narrative takes us to the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona in rural Spain, idealised as yet uncorrupted by modernity. There, in the young bullfighter Pedro Romero, Hemingway creates an iconic representation of the authenticity and sense of purpose that elude Jake and his companions, so riddled with contradictions and self-destructive in their reckless hedonism. About and of its time, The Sun Also Rises speaks to today's readers in the yearning for connection and the psychological complexity of its protagonists, adrift in a world where the collapse of traditional values is a source of exhilaration and of anxiety.