I had forgotten how much I enjoy Hemingway.

Like many of us, I first encountered Hemingway as a high school student slogging my way through assigned reading. In that case, it was A Farewell to Arms, about which I don’t remember a whole lot other than that I enjoyed it far more than I expected to. I recall that it had a succinct but leisurely feel to it, somehow both meandering in the narrative but efficient in the actual prose, and that I enjoyed the weirdly sensual pragmatism of it all. I’m sure there was plenty that was wasted on a 16 yr old in the late nineties, but it made a good impression nonetheless.

A few years later, I read some of his short stories at the behest of a curmudgeonly old gentleman at church (long may you be fondly remembered, Jan Bakker), and enjoyed them, too. And then somehow I didn’t touch his stuff again for twenty years.

When The Sun Also Rises came up on my list of Classics To Read, I went and rummaged around in the living room bookshelves for a bit, chasing a dim memory of a hardcover version from some Barnes and Noble holiday sale. Sure enough, we have a mass produced hard-bound copy of four Hemingway novels published together in an Art-Deco-ish cover that will no doubt begin to peel in another ten years.

I fished it out and dusted it off — bulky and slightly garish as it is, it was a nice change from reading continuously on the kindle, and it had enough weight to hold itself open as I read while eating lunch (my usual reading time).

The Sun Also Rises is, in its own way, a story about not much at all, and those are honestly often my favorite stories. Our hero is a journalist ex-pat living in Paris. He and some friends go south to Pamplona to see the bullfights, of which he is a fan. There is a lot of drinking, quite a bit of arguing, some fishing, and a couple bullfights, and then he goes back to Paris. The entirety of the story is about the small-scale social interactions of himself and his group of friends on this trip, not all of whom get along well (or at all).

That’s it. That’s all there is.

Except, of course, there’s so much more. There are the descriptions of the food, of the daily milieu, of the inhabitants of 1920s Europe. There’s the lushness of the trip south through France and into Spain, the beauty of the environs, the spectacle of the bullfights. There are the clipped but descriptive conversations between all of the characters that so carefully disclose their personalities and foibles and backstories. These may be rich and somewhat dissolute people from a hundred years ago, but I’ve been at terrible parties with all of them — they’re normal, recognizable people, and (much like with Vanity Fair or War and Peace) it’s easy to get drawn into their petty dramas. (There’s also, of course, the period-typical racism/anti-semitism, so do be warned.)

I loved it. It was an easy, enjoyable, satisfying read. Hemingway reminds me in some ways of Carver, another favorite author of mine — there’s something about how neither of them are concerned with plot in the way that modern writers are; instead, they’re focused on putting you in a moment. They want you to feel where the story is, viscerally; to be with the characters as they move about their daily life and work; to find yourself immersed in the story, no matter how small its scale.

10/10, definitely going to read the other three novels in my knock-off fancy hardback edition.