The Sun Also Rises
I feel pretty numb after reading this book. And I only read it because I was going to Paris, and I wanted my trip to Europe to be at least somewhat literary. I also read it because Tianyu recommended it.
It feels like a weird time for me to be reading a book like this, about a woman who has the men of her life in a chokehold and pits them against each other, when I have just met my first serious boyfriend. Julian and I are almost four months in. I don’t think I have ever felt so cared for, supported by, or attracted to someone. For now, at least, I’m too afraid to think about the messiness and pain.
I thought a lot about this quote from Jake:
Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.
I don’t really know what Hemingway is saying here. This is what Tianyu said:
I think I identify with Jake Barnes in the sense that he knows full well that he wants something he can’t get — in his case, being with Brett Ashley because he’s impotent — and makes peace with it. Jake loves Brett in a way that he doesn’t have to be with her, but to be around for her despite what must’ve been humiliating circumstances (which Hemingway seems to downplay?)
I think maybe I interpreted it in a totally different way - can heterosexual women and men form true friendships? Is there some hidden obligation that I am not aware of? Tianyu says that behind the facade of friendship is romantic feelings, which both know isn’t possible. I want to disagree with this. I feel happy with Julian, but I value my friendships with Jack and Tianyu because I share interests with them, no longer because I want to be with them. I feel like Hemingway’s implication here is kind of sexist.
Brett reminds me of Milan Kundera’s idea of lightness. I’m thinking about Hemingway and his friends living on the West Bank. Their lives felt so reckless, so light, in the Kundera sense. They bet hundreds of euros on bullfights and then starve for five days, another fifty euros on a girl who might call. And that was a hundred years ago — so these amounts aren’t even inflation-adjusted. It all feels so foreign and so heretical to me, even though I sometimes find myself craving the same freedom.
I know that I can spend hours analyzing the symbols of the false titles - the European aristocracy (like Brett and Mike) who are impoverished and the nouveau rice Americans who are now buying their way in. But at the surface level, all I see is a bunch of people burning money in France and Spain. I cannot afford their abandon.