The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#3 in my 2007 book challenge was Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises. Long a favorite of my husband, it was more what I was expecting from a Hemingway book than A Moveable Feast: dark, bitter and depressing. The female character had no redeeming aspects, and left a trail of wrecked men in her wake. I felt sorry for all the characters in the book. The writing illustrated a technique Hemingway wrote about in AMF: deliberately leaving out critical detail. We never find out what Jake Barnes’s accident was, how it happened, or any details of its aftermath. This novel is in stark contrast to the remembered sweetness and joy in AMF of his early years in Paris. The ending sentence is powerful and enigmatic, and illustrates the writing advice Hemingway noted in AMF: All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.