The Sun Also Rises

⚖The case for it

Jake Barnes narrates his war wound and his love for Brett without ever naming either, and the restraint is the achievement, meaning kept below the waterline where readers have to go get it. The Paris of the Dome and the Select arrives specific enough that people who know those cafes say "it is 'my' Paris." Then the fishing trip into the Spanish mountains, the warmest stretch in the book, before Pamplona and the bullfights. Rereaders report the thing keeps moving under them: "it is never the same book," and it "improves with age and attention." Even readers soured on Hemingway by school assignments come back and get caught.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

People drink, travel, and flirt for two hundred and fifty pages, and the narration logs it like an "eloquent Garmin device," meal after train after town. Nobody in the group will do anything: "WHY DOES NOBODY IN THIS BOOK HAVE A BACKBONE??" The iceberg theory covers a lot of absence, which one reader renames "the 'skirt theory'" for what it conceals. Brett reads to this camp as careless with the men circling her rather than wounded. Robert Cohn's treatment veers into antisemitic caricature pointed enough that group reads raise it unprompted. And the prose that others call controlled strikes one reader as "2014 Harry Styles Wattpad fanfiction."

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings