Why 'The Sun Also Rises' Is an Oddly Comforting Read Right Now
By: Tara Isabella Burton (WSJ)
FEW NOVELS evoke our current mix of frustrated wanderlust and existential crisis quite like those of Ernest Hemingway. He chronicled the “lost generation” that had come of age against the chaotic backdrop of the first World War, capturing their restlessness and malaise. His masterpiece might be 1926’s “The Sun Also Rises,” whose action moves between the cafe terraces and smoky nightclubs of Paris and the swarming Spanish summers at the bullfights, or corrida. The story of alcoholic American expat Jake Barnes, whose war wounds have left him impotent, and his failed love affair with the independent, brash Lady Brett Ashley, the novel won’t satisfy everyone’s definition of comforting. But it’s the ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost.
Jake and Brett’s on-again-off-again relationship takes them across the Europe of the 1920s, a place of both unbridled hedonism and deep cynicism, lasting scars of the war. Other dissolute expatriates—most of whom also carry a flame for Brett—people the novel, from the romantically tormented writer Robert Cohn to the dubious Greek count Mippipopolous to the young, pure-hearted bullfighter Romero.
Hemingway’s detailed descriptions of Parisian cafe society and the running of the bulls at Pamplona are sufficiently compelling to whisk us away, at least briefly, from our cloistered homes. But the far darker themes he touches on—how to make sense of a time in crisis, how to find authenticity and meaning out of upheaval—are as pertinent as they’ve ever been. At its core, the book is about confusion: young people asking the question what now. As we make sense of our own loss, Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” reminds us that so many have felt this before.
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