Overcast

THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway. I've read some strange attacks on this book. “Nothing happens,” “its boring,” “they just sit around and drink.” My favorite, in its various incarnations, distills to, “stupid rich brats living it up while I slave away.” Now, I like For Whom the Bell Tolls, I like Old Man and the Sea, I really like A Farewell to Arms, but I love The Sun Also Rises. My copy is old and weathered, a 1954 Scribner's paperback of my dad's that has a pretty watercolor painting on the cover. When it finally falls apart I’ll be genuinely upset. There are the bullfights, the cafes, the fishing, the descriptions of the Spanish countryside, the meals, the fights, the drinks. Somehow Hemingway made it all both subtly and blaringly anti-war, or at least anti-Great War. I find it haunting and elegiac, of course, but also truly horrifying and depressing. Some of these people will never pick up the pieces; they are emotionally ruined just as sure as Jake has been sexually destroyed. Can you imagine that fascism was still looming over the horizon? What a world we live in. By all means have another absinthe. Just thinking about it makes me need one.