The Sun Also Rises by Ernest HemingwayMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm really happy that I gave Hemingway a second chance. The only other book of his that I'd read previously was 'The Old Man and the Sea', and it was in high school. Given what I know now of his major works, I'd say it likely wasn't the most representative of his books, so I'm looking forward to reading more.
'The Sun Also Rises' was very different from the fiction I normally read, but fits in well with my experience of early twentieth century American literature. Though I haven't read all of the American classics yet, my impression from Fitzgerald et al is that the 1920s were a time of disillusionment and a feeling of a lack of direction among young adults, who had seen World War I at a formative time in their lives and weren't quite sure how they should feel about the world they lived in. (Now, of course, disillusioned youth are a total cliche, but I get the feeling that this kind of characterization was absolutely groundbreaking at the time it was written.)
There isn't the same assuredness about the cycles of life and one's priorities as there is in Victorian literature. Young people in Hemingway's '20s aren't limited to their immediate surroundings in the same way. Even for the rich, as in Forster's 'A Room with a View' for example, Victorian literature seems to feature very structured lifestyles and very sheltered young people. Any trips they take abroad (to Italy, Spain, France, etc) from the US or England are carefully chaperoned and itineraried.
In contrast, Hemingway has revealed in 'The Sun Also Rises' a whole new generation of travelers who don't seem to plan their lives more than a few days in advance. Some of them, like Hemingway's main character Jake, have jobs - but they don't work regular hours. They sit for extended lunch-hours in Paris cafes, and take off for Spanish vacations on a moment's notice. Friends join them spontaneously, and involve themselves with each other's fiancees equally spontaneously. The Victorians would have seen these people as little better than tramps, yet Hemingway was living this kind of lifestyle in Paris himself and hanging out with the greatest writers of his time - Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, etc.
To me, the entire book was a justification of a life away from what I've referred to, in conversations with friends, as "the treadmill". Growing up in the community that I did, and having the parents that I do, there was never any doubt in anyone's mind - least of all my own - that I would graduate from high school with the highest marks, attend a high-quality university and graduate with honours, and then attend some sort of graduate school. From there, I would obtain a job reflecting the program I had studied and proceed to excel in every aspect of life. This is the prescribed path for young upper-middle-class Canadians, and I never suspected in the least that there was any option to deviate from this. Then once I graduated from my first university experience and immediately embarked upon my Master's degree, I noticed that not everyone was following this path. Somehow, some of the people I'd gone to university or high school with had managed to jump off the treadmill. They were already working full-time jobs, some of them on the other side of the country or overseas. Some of them were simply traveling, for months or a year, teaching in Asia, hiking through South America, surfing in Australia.
I couldn't understand this. Where had they gotten the money to just take off like that? What were they going to do for jobs once they returned from their adventures with a giant hole in their resumes? And most importantly, why had I never once considered doing the same thing? Years later, firmly entrenched in my existence as a 9-to-5 urbanite with rent to pay and a budding career to think about, reading books like 'Eat Pray Love' drive me crazy. Of course I can't just take off for a year and live in Italy, India and Indonesia, or some equally-alliterative trio of countries. Nobody is giving me a book advance to pay for that kind of thing, and Elizabeth Gilbert's portrayal of her trip rings slightly false to anyone whose work is tied to a particular city, office building, or cubicle.
But now, reading Hemingway has given me a new perspective. At the end of the day, how much of this will matter? Jake's cynicism seems to me like a message that we should all try to do exactly what we want with our lives - and include some spontaneity and illogical decisions - because later on, all of this structure will be meaningless and we should make as many memories as we can, while we can.
