Some books are so bad they can be called a "trainwreck." That's not good, obviously, but sometimes a book can be such a mess, such a disaster, that you can love to hate it. You know: "So bad it's good."
"The Sun Also Rises," Ernest Hemingway's 1926 book, is definitely not a trainwreck, but you may end up wishing it was.
This book is more of a slow-moving trolley that carries a group of friends placidly around town as they drink, eat and engage in insipid small talk. The trolley doesn't hit anything and nothing hits it. It just goes around the same loop, going over the same ground again and again.
To be fair, "The Sun Also Rises" is fairly easy to read. The disalogue is crisp and Hemingway is able to nicely describes a scene without excess flowery language.
But remarkably little happens. Hemingway faithfully records every time a character bathes, gets a haircut or shaves. He notes when they get bored at one cafe, and go to another. He describes a fishing trip where they do little more than dig up worms for bait, talk and drink wine.
"The Sun Also Rises" portrays the lives of five alcoholic friends living in Paris in the 1920s. They flirt a little, dance a little, but mostly they drink.
The characters drink wine, beer, whiskey, martinis, cognac, brandy, absinthe and a liqueur called Izzarra. They drink in the morning, afternoon and night. There is so much drinking in "The Sun Also Rises" that you might wake up with a second-hand hangover just from turning the pages.
Unlike a tranwreck, where the flaws are obvious, this "trolley" kind of book lulls you into thinking that something good is just around the bend. But it almost never is.
Here's a typical passage:
"I unpacked my bags and stacked my books on the table beside the head of the bed, put out my shaving things, hung up some clothes in the big armoire, and made up a bundle for the laundry. Then I took a shower in the bathroom and went down to lunch."
You might think that there is some reason, to be revealed later, that Hemingway has mentioned the stacking of the books, the hanging of the clothes and the other details. But you'd be wrong.
It is remarkable that an author like Hemingway has created such a basket of uninteresting and unlikeable characters. The narrator, Jake, and a couple other characters are so featureless as to be bland. The main female character, Brett, is self-absorbed and tiresome. Another one, Mike, becomes a jerk when he drinks (which is most of the time).
It wouldn't be fair to say that nothing happens. In the second half of the book, the characters go to Pamplona, Spain, for the running of the bulls and bullfighting. Hemingway vividly describes these events, touching on the culture, subtle artistry, and brutality of bullfighting. This part is worth reading, but it's only about 8 percent of the book.
After the bullfighting, the characters leave Pamplona, most heading back to Paris. The book should have ended there, but for some reason Hemingway tacks on a pointless extra chapter where Jake talks to some bicyclists and goes for a relaxing swim in the ocean. Oh, and he drinks.
A head's up for readers: "The Sun Also Rises" has at least nine uses of the N-word and multiple anti-Jewish insults, including the word "kike."
