‘The Sun Also Rises’ by Ernest Hemingway
This is one of those book reviews that I have had stewing in my mind for months. It keeps me up at night, sometimes, wondering what opinions I will put forth, what thoughts I will attempt to put into words.
At first, I thought I would write an entire review, characters, plot, the whole shebang. In reality, I just want to talk about one thing in particular, the style of writing.
Most of the time, I find style hard to pick out and hard to define. How does each writers sunrise differ from each other? Of course, authors all have a different story to tell, and a unique way of telling it. I can explain the differences between stories all day long, it is the way of telling it I can’t always explain.
Not so with Hemingway. His style is a completely new reading experience for me, new and distinct from the other books I have encountered. So different I was able to see only a few pages into it what made his writing unique from all the others.
When I was reading ‘The Sun Also Rises’, I felt a little as though I was reading a report of the world. Almost like reading an article in a newspaper. The writing was terse and sparse, nothing unnecessary or flowery in the descriptions. From what I remember, even the sentences were short and to the point. Which is exactly what it all was, to the point. No side jaunts into meadows, no stopping to philosophize, no prose wasted on flowers.
The more I have thought about it, the more I have been struck how hard it must have been to only describe what was necessary. Or perhaps it wasn’t hard for him. But most authors I have read form that time tended towards the flowery and philosophical. Take F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance. His novels all have descriptions of the setting which are beautiful, necessary to set the mood and describe a place, but not to move a plot along.
How hard would it be to squish all impulse of the poetic and focus solely on the story itself? Or maybe it was how Hemingway saw the world, as a story that is moving along at a fast clip, with no time to stop and smell the roses.
Another part of his style was how much the story focused on the outward lives of the characters. The story is told from first person point of view, but even the narrator does not spend much time dwelling on his thoughts. What he truly thinks and feels about a situation we have to infer even from his own thoughts. This is completely different from the many inward focused novels I have read, which are so entirely in the characters minds the outside world fades away completely. In this novel, the plot is still the main focus, and the thoughts and feelings of the characters are pushed and pulled along by the plot, rather than the other way around. The above description may make it seem as though they are all passive characters, victims of a story rather than heroes of it. It is not so, the characters make decisions and take action and do what they feel is best. It is rather that the emphasis of the novel is on the actions and the plot rather than their inward lives. We see who they are by what they do, not what they do by who they are.
I just might have described every good novel, showing us the characters instead of telling us about them. However, ‘The Sun Also Rises’ is the book I see it the most clearly in, where my eyes have been opened to how showing a character instead of telling it can be done.
I am interested in reading more of Hemingway, I want to see if this style is as clear in the rest of his novels. However, as much as I am in awe of his style, I will not be abandoning my poetic novelists who see beauty in meadows and streams just yet.
Have a wonderful start to your week.
Shaina Merrick
The Beauty of a Story 