FIESTA : The Sun Also Rises - The first Novel by a Genius

FIESTA :   The  Sun  Also  Rises   - The first Novel by a Genius

Let me take this opportunity to wish all my readers a Happy, Peaceful, Healthy and Prosperous New Year.    Be happy and content!

               

FIESTA:  The Sun Also Rises is a classic example of Hemingway’s genius writing style.  It’s American and quintessential novel of the Lost Generation. It’s a masterpiece by the Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway and his first novel.  This Novel established him as a great writer of enviable talent of the twentieth century.

 A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.

I hold Hemingway in high esteem.   Before reviewing my most favorite writer’s much acclaimed work, though Hemingway does not need any introduction, let me introduce Hemingway to the novices.

                 

















              
 Ernest Hemingway

       
Hemingway House in Key West, Florida

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1989. His father was a doctor and he was the second of the six children.  Their home was at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb in the United States of America.

In 1917 Hemingway joined the Kansas city Star as a cub reporter. The following year he volunteered to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919 and married in 1921. In 1922 he reported on the Greco-Turkish war, then two years later he resigned from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with such fellow American expatriates as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Their encouragement and criticism were to play a vulnerable part in the formation of his style.

Hemingway’s first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and in our Time but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, which established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books: Fiesta, Men without Women and A Farewell To Arms. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing, and his writing reflected this. He visited Spain during Civil War and described his experiences in the bestseller, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

His direct and deceptively simple style of writing spawned generation of imitators but no equals. Recognition and his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Noblel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea.

Ernest Hemingway died in 1961. 

‘One generation passeth away , and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever…  The sun also ariseth, and  the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose….The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth  about continually, and the wind returneth again according to the circuits…All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place whence the rivers come, thither they return again.’ 

                --ECCLESIASTES

Plot Summary:

The Sun Also Rises opens with the narrator, Jake Barnes, delivering a brief biographical sketch of his friend, Robert Cohn. Jake is a veteran of World War I who now works as a journalist in Paris. Cohn is also an American expatriate, although not a war veteran. He is a rich Jewish writer who lives in Paris with his forceful and controlling girlfriend, Frances Clyne. Cohn has become restless of late, and he comes to Jake’s office one afternoon to try to convince Jake to go with him to South America. Jake refuses, and he takes pains to get rid of Cohn. That night at a dance club, Jake runs into Lady Brett Ashley, a divorced socialite and the love of Jake’s life. Brett is a free-spirited and independent woman, but she can be very selfish at times. She and Jake met in England during World War I, when Brett treated Jake for a war wound. During Jake and Brett’s conversation, it is subtly implied that Jake’s injury rendered him impotent. Although Brett loves Jake, she hints that she is unwilling to give up sex, and that for this reason she will not commit to a relationship with him.

The next morning, Jake and Cohn have lunch. Cohn is quite taken with Brett, and he gets angry when Jake tells him that Brett plans to marry Mike Campbell, a heavy-drinking Scottish war veteran. That afternoon, Brett stands Jake up. That night, however, she arrives unexpectedly at his apartment with Count Mippipopolous, a rich Greek expatriate. After sending the count out for champagne, Brett tells Jake that she is leaving for San Sebastian, in Spain, saying it will be easier on both of them to be apart.

Several weeks later, while Brett and Cohn are both traveling outside of Paris, one of Jake’s friends, a fellow American war veteran named Bill Gorton, arrives in Paris. Bill and Jake make plans to leave for Spain to do some fishing and later attend the fiesta at Pamplona. Jake makes plans to meet Cohn on the way to Pamplona. Jake runs into Brett, who has returned from San Sebastian; with her is Mike, her fiancé. They ask if they may join Jake in Spain, and he politely responds that they may. When Mike leaves for a moment, Brett reveals to Jake that she and Cohn were in San Sebastian together.

Bill and Jake take a train from Paris to Bayonne, in the south of France, where they meet Cohn. The three men travel together into Spain, to Pamplona. They plan on meeting Brett and Mike that night, but the couple does not show up. Bill and Jake decide to leave for a small town called Burguete to fish, but Cohn chooses to stay and wait for Brett. Bill and Jake travel to the Spanish countryside and check into a small, rural inn. They spend five pleasant days fishing, drinking, and playing cards. Eventually, Jake receives a letter from Mike. He writes that he and Brett will be arriving in Pamplona shortly. Jake and Bill leave on a bus that afternoon to meet the couple. After arriving in Pamplona, Jake and Bill check into a hotel owned by Montoya, a Spanish bullfighting expert who likes Jake for his earnest interest in the sport. Jake and Bill meet up with Brett, Mike, and Cohn, and the whole group goes to watch the bulls being unloaded in preparation for the bullfights during the fiesta. Mike mocks Cohn harshly for following Brett around when he is not wanted.

After a few more days of preparation, the fiesta begins. The city is consumed with dancing, drinking, and general debauchery. The highlight of the first day is the first bullfight, at which Pedro Romero, a nineteen-year-old prodigy, distinguishes himself above all the other bullfighters. Despite its violence, Brett cannot take her eyes off the bullfight, or Romero. A few days later, Jake and his friends are at the hotel dining room, and Brett notices Romero at a nearby table. She persuades Jake to introduce her to him. Mike again verbally abuses Cohn, and they almost come to blows before Jake defuses the situation. Later that night, Brett asks Jake to help her find Romero, with whom she says she has fallen in love. Jake agrees to help, and Brett and Romero spend the night together.

Jake then meets up with Mike and Bill, who are both extremely drunk. Cohn soon arrives, demanding to know where Brett is. After an exchange of insults, Cohn attacks Mike and Jake, knocking them both out. When Jake returns to the hotel, he finds Cohn lying face down on his bed and crying. Cohn begs Jake’s forgiveness, and Jake reluctantly grants it. The next day, Jake learns from Bill and Mike that the night before Cohn also beat up Romero when he discovered the bullfighter with Brett; Cohn later begged Romero to shake hands with him, but Romero refused.

At the bullfight that afternoon, Romero fights brilliantly, dazzling the crowd by killing a bull that had gored a man to death in the streets. Afterward, he cuts the bull’s ear off and gives it to Brett. After this final bullfight, Romero and Brett leave for Madrid together. Cohn has left that morning, so only Bill, Mike, and Jake remain as the fiesta draws to a close.

The next day, the three remaining men rent a car and drive out of Spain to Bayonne and then go their separate ways. Jake heads back into Spain to San Sebastian, where he plans to spend several quiet days relaxing. He receives a telegram from Brett, however, asking him to come meet her in Madrid. He complies, and boards an overnight train that same day. Jake finds Brett alone in a Madrid hotel room. She has broken with Romero, fearing that she would ruin him and his career. She announces that she now wants to return to Mike. Jake books tickets for them to leave Madrid. As they ride in a taxi through the Spanish capital, Brett laments that she and Jake could have had a wonderful time together. Jake responds, “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Book Review:

Powerful, intense, visually magnificent, Fiesta is the novel which established Ernest Hemingway as a writer of genius.

Ernest Hemingway opens the novel with this quote from Gertrud Stein. “You are the lost generation” and a passage from Ecclesiastes in which the title “the sun also rises” appears and the view that life goes on even though we individual humans pass What follows is the brilliantly written story of a group of those lost generation folks in the 1920s, ex-pats living in Paris, then visiting Spain. The central figure, surely closely related to Hemingway himself, is a newspaper writer, a loner in love with Brett Ashley, but neither of them able to live a life which would or could have enough commitment to make a love relationship work. Nevertheless, Brett and Jake do have a beautiful friendship and mutual support.

The other major characters are rather sad folks, lost, without meaning, and often, seemingly before the phrase was invented, very ugly Americans. There is Michael, the man Brett seems destined to marry and tortured by her constant infidelities, an ex-boxer, Robert Cohn, pathetically in love with Brett but scorned by her, and fairly likeable Bill Groton. This group parties constantly, staying drunk more than sober, seemingly to escape the meaninglessness of their highly privileged lives, and to convince themselves they are having fun.

At one point late in the novel Brett makes a rather humane decision to spare a young lover, an up and coming bull fighter, from being destroyed by her. She tells Jake:

“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.

“Yes.

“It’s sort of what we have instead of God."

I read that claim as less about the notion of God of religion than as a comment of a value system which gives a person a reason to live with dignity, hope, even pride. Such moments are rare for these sad even pathetic folks. Hemingway captures their lives with amazing power and vivid description.

There is a very long and famous section where the whole group goes to Pamplona for the festival of the running of the bulls. Hemingway’s account is both gripping and as vivid as photographs.

However, a secondary theme in that section is what ugly Americans they are. (Actually Brett and Michael are British). Taking advantage of their relative wealth to live high above the life-style of the locals, they sneer at the people’s quite beautiful lives and culture. In one place Jake says:

“The waiter recommended a Basque liqueur called Izzarra. He brought in the bottle and poured a liqueur-glass full. The veritable flower of the Pyrenees. It looked like hair-oil and smelled like Italian strega. I told him to take the flowers of the Pyrenees away and bring me a vieux marc. The marc was good. I had a second marc after the coffee.





“The waiter seemed a little offended about the flowers of the Pyrenees, so I over-tipped him. That made him happy. It felt comfortable to be in a country where it is so simple to make people happy. You can never tell whether a Spanish waiter will thank you. Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you, you only have to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities. He would be glad to see me back. I would dine there again sometime and he would be glad to see me, and could want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis. I was back in France next morning and I tipped everyone a bit too much at the hotel to make more friends, and left on the morning train for San Sebastian. At the station I did not tip the porter more than I should have because I did not think I would ever see him again. I only wanted a few good French friends in Bayonne to make me welcome in case I should come back there again. I know that if they remembered me their friendship would be loyal.”

It is ironic that I’m writing these comments on an airplane from Barcelona to Chicago, returning home from a month in Greece, Turkey and Spain where I engaged in such practices myself. However, I do think that in the main my entry into the local cultures was in such a way that I tried to avoid much of such behavior as I could. It is difficult to avoid, and many of the tourist workers in many countries even encourage such behavior in the visitors to increase their own earnings.

This great novel of Hemingway should not be missed. It is alive today as it was when published nearly 80 years ago.

Friends, this was the single book that so fatefully launched Ernest Hemingway's amazing and long-lived literary career. As such it is as close to being a legendary book as they come, yet some seventy five years after its initial publication, it still offers a story that is also surprisingly fresh, personal, and memorable. For all of his obvious excesses, Hemingway was an artist compelled to delve deliberately into painful truths, and he attempted to do so with a style of writing that cut away all of the frills and artifice, so that at it s heart this novel is meant as an exploration into what it means to be adult and alive. Thus we are introduced to Jake Barnes, a veteran of World War One, now forced by his wounds to live as a man without the ability to act like one, forced by impotence to forgo all of life's usual intimacies, and all of its associated life connections for which he so yearns. At the same time, Jake attempts to live a life of meaning and purpose, one crammed full with activity, work, and friendships. Yet it is within this network of friendships and connections that he must confront his painful circumstances.

Enter his true love, the feckless Lady Ashley, and indeed the plot thickens, for we soon see how Jake's physical affliction has painfully affected several others. Ashley loves him, but needs a virile man who can give her the physical love she needs. While Ashley is a woman of uncommon beauty, she is also virtuous enough in her own way to want the one man she truly loves to be her lover. Like all of us, she wants most that which she can never have, and so she returns to the source of her own dilemma time after time to Jake, her emotional match, the one man who cannot give her the mature emotional love she craves. So they are condemned to circle around each other, even while some of their friends and other members of the in-crowd interfere, compete, and seek Ashley's affections around the edges of the continuing affair.

 
What we are left with is a modern tragedy, one in which the characters must somehow resolve their resolvable.

                                   

Yet for all this emotional turmoil and existential `strum-und-drank' of the so-called "lost generation", people drowning in the moral anomie and circumstantial wasteland created in the gutters of their own endless wants and needs, it is most often Hemingway's imaginative and spare use of the language itself that wins the reader over. Unlike his predecessors, he sought a lean narrative style that cut away at all the flowery description and endless adjectives. In the process of parsing away the excesses, Hemingway created a clear, simple and quite declarative prose style that was truly both modern and revolutionary. What one encounters as a result is a story seemingly stripped to its barest essentials, superficially more like the newspaper man's pantheon of who, what, where, when, and why, and yet somehow transformed into a much more accurate and imaginative effort, one leaving the reader with a much more artful account of what is going on. One reads Hemingway quickly, at least at first, when one learns to slow down and drink in every word and every detail as it is related. For me and for millions of others, the true genius of Hemingway is to be found in his artful use of language. This book was Hemingway's first truly successful foray into the world of letters, and the result changed the face of modern fiction. Enjoy!

I would like to present here some of Hemingway’s  Book Titles and books about Hemingway :

 

 The works of Hemingway -

Fiesta

The Torrents of Spring

A Farewell to Arms

To Have and Havenot

Across the River and into the Trees

The Old Man and The Sea

Islands in the Stream

The Garden of Eden

True at First Light

Stories –

Men without Women

Winner Take Nothing

The Snow of Kilimanjaro

General –

A Moveable Feast

Death in the Afternoon

Green Hills of Africa

The Dangerous Summer

Drama –

The Fifth Column

Collected Works –

The Essential Hemingway

The First Forty-Nine Stories

By-Line

Hemingway’s direct and deceptively simple style of writing spawned generations of imitators but no equals.

Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea.

While we were ushering in the New Year, I thought of publishing a new BLOG and of course none better than this post about the great author Ernest Hemingway.