The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I haven’t read Hemingway since I was a boy. Note his simple language, short sentences:

No one was up before noon. We ate at tables set out under the arcade. The town was full of people. We had to wait for a table. After lunch we went over to the Iruña. It had filled up, and as the time for the bull-fight came it got fuller, and the tables were crowded closer.

Hemingway’s stark prose style is often referenced in writing guides and prose guru’s online posts. Despite The Sun Also Rises (1926) having a first person narrator, Jake Barnes, an American expat, journalist and WWI injured veteran, his recording of a trip to the running of the bulls of Pamplona with his Yankee mates and an English Lady, is starkly objective. His particular war-injury is significant to the theme – no spoilers here. This group, often likened to the ‘lost generation’, seem to be searching for meaning in the bars and the bottles of southern France and northern Spain where they observe the locals getting on with their ‘ordinary’ lives but seem blind to the meaning staring them in the face. The bull fighting festival is the climax of the piece and described in blistering but, of course, in his stark prose. If squeamish about such ‘sport’ you could skip it. These lost souls either with money or without who have ignored the ‘roaring twenties’ milieu of the cities, seem helpless to know where to turn or what to do. Hemingway’s theme: the damage of war. Although it received mixed reviews at its first publication it has become known in some circles as his greatest work. There aren’t too many contemporary novelists who write like this any more as this style requires the reader to supply a lot of detail, but it is nonetheless surprisingly effective. (Come to think of it, it is similar to that of David Szalay and his Booker Prize winning novel Flesh – 2025). And all the more effective by describing a time and place that would be unknown to most readers. Fiction can do that: take you to the unknown. If you haven’t read Hemingway, do; there’s a lot of his work to enjoy including a lengthy list of short story collections.