Visiting a friend abroad last month, struck with jetlag, I pulled Hemingway's Fiesta, the Sun Also Rises from the book shelves, and half completed by the time I left and craving to get to back to it, some twenty years after I'd first read it, bought a copy at a book shop to finish on the plane back. What a mistake perhaps to have everyone read this in high school, and feel like they've already read it, when you can't begin to understand it until later. (Then again, when one thinks of how young are the soldiers going to war, perhaps not). As with so much that seems at first like a kind of thrilling romanticism from the modern period (DH Lawrence, Joyce), how it too is a kind of war novel, or post-war novel, about the breakdown in the order of things that occurred after the suffering of the first world war, and how it made going on in a certain way, the old way, impossible, but what will replace it hasn't yet fully emerged. What's most devastating about it is that it at first reads as a kind of novel about the pursuit of pleasure and authentic experience: beauty, Paris, love, the bullfights, fishing, wine, Spain -- a moveable feast. And what it's ultimately about of course is despair, a crushing, existential, perhaps inconsolable despair, masked in all these elegant scenes (San Sebastian, Paris, Pamplona), that consumes the reporter narrator, injured as a volunteer in the war, as well as the novel's beautiful, aristocratic heroine Brett Ashley, a bystander as a nurse whose boyfriend is killed in the war, her many post-war admirers as lost as she is amid the endless, elegant vacation. All of them succumbed to alcoholism as the addictive anesthetic for their unspoken predicament. But there are glimpses of the future too in the breakdown of the old social order--Brett's brief dalliance with a Jewish admirer, at first tolerated and ultimately openly despised by the others. Worth reading or re-reading if like me you haven't picked it up in a number of years.

Posted by Laura at December 7, 2008 11:09 PM