The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Hemingway is out of fashion these days, so much out of fashion it's sort of chic to say you like his work. Well, I didn't exactly like this novel, but I did understand it, something I can't say happened last time I read it back in the late 50s when Papa was still alive.
The book, it turns out, is about loyalty. The narrator introduces a young bull fighter, a man who is going to be a star before long, to a woman who will distract him and encourage him to drink too much and he will lose his innocence and his focus on his job. The people in the town in Spain, who have come to think of him as one of them because he is knowledgeable and loves the sport, now spurn him. He has been disloyal to them.
The is at the heart of Hemingway's belief in heroism and loyalty and love and the man in the arena. The book has much more to say, of course, and it's a delight to read about Paris' left bank in the 1920s. It is possible to figure out who the real people are on whom he has based his characters, none of whom he has treated gently. His spare style, used by many writers now, was shockingly new at the time he burst onto the literary scene.
There is much to know and to like and to enjoy about Hemingway's novels and a good biography is intensely interesting, considering his women and his children and his constant yearning for the heroic.
2011 No 174
Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The movie, Daddy-Longlegs, starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, was made in 1955 and so I thought the book had been written in the early 1950s. A young girl is taken from an orphanage by a wealthy benefactor and sent to college and the '50s were when women were starting to go to college in large numbers. The story seemed at the time to be very modern.
We watched it again a while back and that sent me to the book to re-read what was a delight to me when I was a girl. And I discovered it was published in 1912. Mary Pickford was the first Judy in the 1919 silent film. Remarkable.
The author, Jean Webster, was a women's rights crusader and a socialist and the book was way ahead of its time. There is a sequel, Dear Enemy, which I intend to read soon.
2011 No 175
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