The Sun Also Rises

I picked this book off my shelf a few months ago knowing that I was on a high-speed collision course with a re-read. I am not sure where I got this copy. It is dated on the inside cover in handwriting 1966. It is blue clothbound and cotton paged, and the pages feel very nice.

Book spoilers below.

I love the book. It is 250 pages of heartbreak and lovesickness. Every character within is detestable. Jake, the protagonist, is wounded in the war and it is suggested that what happened is he got his penis shot off, or at least rendered totally inoperable. The first time I read this I thought it was his testicles that he lost, but this read I think it is more than that. Jake is in love with Lady Brett, a woman that passes in and out of his life seemingly with the sole purpose of torturing him. She claims several times to love him, too, but she cannot maintain any relationship and engages in numerous affairs with basically ever male character in the book.

One of her favorite things to do is talk to Jake about her affairs right after asking if he still loves her. She'll say she loves him and then talk about another man. Or she'll ask Jake to set her up with another man. And Jake, the masochist that he is, basically facilitates this. I wonder if it's because he feels that, since he can't sleep with her, this is the closest he can get to giving her pleasure.

I find all that pretty tiring. For one, I think it is insanely lacking creativity in a very straight way. There are more ways to give pleasure than a penis and besides, there are tools available for such a thing. I think if these two really loved each other, they could figure something out. Hence my thought that Brett does not actually love Jake at all. I think she is dependent on him for getting her out of messes. She uses him. I think there's a part of her that enjoys flaunting her triumphs in front of him. I think she is very cruel. I think there is basically no behavior that could be more cruel than what she does.

And yet, Jake just takes it all. Early in the book, a different character is lambasted by his fiance and Jake asks why he takes it. Why doesn't he ask himself? He does nothing at all to set boundaries with Brett. He seems just happy as can be to be punished over and over again. Part of me understands this in a frustrating way. But Jake seems to resign himself to getting drunk and watching all of this as a passenger. He always comes to her aid whenever asks. Very frustrating.

The book has a lot of stuff that any consummate depressee can appreciate. Some great quotes:

* p31 - My head started to work. The old grievance.
* p31 - Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway.. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.
* p34 - It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
* p148 - I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't!

And sometimes it can be pretty funny. It has one of my favorite jokes in a Hemingway book:

* p136 - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

There is a bunch of stuff in the bullfighting about steers and all that and sure there's some themes you could connect Cohn and Jake to Steers and others to the others and blah blah blah. It doesn't really matter because I don't really care about all that. It's a book about Jake being in love with someone who isn't available to him and he doesn't know what to do with that other than to absorb all of the pain in the world. The book closes with Brett and Jake riding in a car, pressed together. Brett saying how good they could have been together (not that they put any work into even giving it a shot!). Jake says, “Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?”

Pretty thoughts will only get you so far. And the prettiest thoughts and the darkest thoughts have this in common: they hurt the most.

A very good book full of hateable characters! Classic Hemingway, the asshole knows how humans are.

By the way – the more I read the more I'm convinced he might have been gay. Lady Brett and the other women are described in whatever way. But he is so interested in describing men and their faces and their pretty lips and eyes. He writes about men how I write about men. It's a shame because I am frankly sick of reading about straight relationships and would love to read about gay love and/or grief in the style of Hemingway.