Anti-Social: 'The Sun Also Rises'

I was browsing through my list of 'books to read', and this one jumped out. I had read Old Man and the Sea and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I decided to borrow this one.

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway writes in a very simplistic manner. His sentence structure, the one-dimensional development of his characters, the repetitive nature of ideas and conversations continuously brought up had me quite bored. I couldn't, for the life of me, remember if Old Man and the Sea held the same torturously monotonous tone that this book had. If it did, I had forgotten. Nevertheless, I plowed through, hoping that this book would impress as I progressed into the story.

The Sun Also Rises is about a group of friends who live in Paris after World War I. We are seeing the world through the eyes of Jack, a journalist, who is friends with a boxing Jew, a promiscuous woman who is divorcing her husband to marry her fiance, and a fishing buddy. Most of the book is spent in Spain, where the five characters meet to witness the annual bull-fighting. While there, the woman falls in love with the bull-fighter, even though the man she's promised to marry is with her.

There are several things I perceived while going through this book. Hemingway is very lax with the derogatory anti-black, anti-Semitic terms I find prevalent in white authors of the time. I personally find such straightforward racism to be distasteful and unnecessary.

The friendships portrayed in this book are those of convenience, though it's very clear that these five people are not particularly fond of each other. I also noticed that the conversations that were had were lacking in any kind of goal, and questions and thoughts were repeated to the point of confusion. What was the point in asking the same questions or making the same remarks?

For me, this book was quite pointless in its subject matter, which, if I am to be correct, was the goal. Hemingway hoped to present the reality that there were people who wondered around aimlessly after the War, drifting through life. I certainly got that feel as I was reading, and I can't say that I particularly enjoyed it. This is a very forgettable book, one that I read only because Hemingway is seen as a classical American author. The Sun Also Rises has proven to me the nagging, sad disdain I hold for many American authors. That is to say that this kind of book is beneficial only to those who consider themselves the bourgeoisie of the world. The aimlessness of life as seen here is one that only rich, white Americans and Europeans can understand and appreciate.