BotM January: THE SUN ALSO RISES

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > BotM January: THE SUN ALSO RISES

Vavrek: Mar 2, 2013; I like your style hombre, but this is no laughing matter. Assault on a police officer. Theft of police property. Illegal possession of a firearm. FIVE counts of attempted murder. That comes to... 29 dollars and 40 cents. Cash, cheque, or credit card?

The only Hemingway I've read before was Hills Like White Elephants, for class, which I didn't enjoy. (Either the story or the discussion around it.)

Not very far yet into The Sun Also Rises, as I'm mostly reading at work, when it's slow and I remember the BotM exists. But I got to this bit:

Ernest Hemingway posted:

“I laughed about it too, myself, once.” She wasn’t looking at me. “A friend of my brother’s came home that way from Mons. It seemed like a hell of a joke. Chaps never know anything, do they?”
“No,” I said. “Nobody ever knows anything.”
I was pretty well through with the subject. At one time or another I had probably considered it from most of its various angles, including the one that certain injuries or imperfections are a subject of merriment while remaining quite serious for the person possessing them.

And my immediate thought was simply: "what, did this guy get shot in the balls in the war?"

So far, it's sort of ... pleasantly written, I guess, and I don't yet care about any of the characters. The dialogue makes me wonder. Given the book is almost one century old, am I struggling to follow the meanings of what characters are saying because:
* It's century-old slang.
* The communication style, separate from the vocabulary, has shifted so much.
* These characters are a bunch of weirdos who speak in circumlocutions.
* I'm missing the raw lived experience context of The Great War.
* It's just Hemingway, he always writes people talking like this.

I'm trying to recall how I felt about The Great Gatsby's use of language, and its dialogue. I only first read (listened, to an audiobook) it last year.

One thing my brother mentioned to me, when talking about the current pandemic, was how quickly the 1918 flu was memory-holed, and that it wasn't mentioned once in The Great Gatsby. I'm curious to see if Hemingway brings it up in any way.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2022 19:35

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# ¿ Jan 19, 2025 20:39

Vavrek: Mar 2, 2013; I like your style hombre, but this is no laughing matter. Assault on a police officer. Theft of police property. Illegal possession of a firearm. FIVE counts of attempted murder. That comes to... 29 dollars and 40 cents. Cash, cheque, or credit card?

the JJ posted:

I think it's the last one. At least in my experience Hemingway really liked to write in a way that makes you go a layer deep to figure out what's going on. Eventually I grew to like it, but it's not for everyone. It kinda forces you to engage with what's going on.

I figured it was probably that. There are some books I've read that're more like that than others, though which ones escapes me right now. That sort of experience, particularly on a reread, of thinking "because I (think I) know what they're talking about, now, what they're saying in this scene works really well."

Nae posted:

I read this book about six months ago on a whim, knowing absolutely nothing about it other than the author. I came away from it with this:

Does the protagonist still have his dick? Possibly, yes, but it was funnier to me to imagine that his dick got shot clean off.

I knew it.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2022 02:12

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