You could redact all the stuff about bullfighting, and Jake Barnes’s missing penis-which, let’s face it, is all fine as far as it goes but it gets a little ridiculous-and you’d still be left with one of the most overwhelmingly human books ever written. But what I really like about it is that nobody else describes the kinds of moments Hemingway does in that book: the interstitial, throwaway moments that are what life is mostly made of. This makes The Sun Also Rises sound like some kind of technical exercise. Not you, not me, not Flaubert, definitely not Hemingway.) The Sun Also Rises first edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926) But nobody’s going to solve that conundrum. (And yes, I suppose Hemingway’s obsessive un-showiness is its own kind of showiness. He’s absolutely determined to get out of the way of what’s going on, to make the verbal membrane between you and the action so thin you can almost touch it, and he does. His prose is so unadorned and unshowy it’s practically ego-less-not a thing one usually hears said about Hemingway, but it’s true. Nobody working in English, or at least in American, had seriously attempted to put the lessons of Flaubert into practice before Hemingway. The discipline of the writing alone is astounding-that’s the kind of thing Hemingway would have said, but it’s absolutely true. So you can see the problem.īut if I were to pick a single American author who has influenced me, it would be silly to skip Hemingway, and if I were to pick a single book it would be ridiculous to skip The Sun Also Rises. After he was praised he was encrusted with a layer of bad Hemingway imitations, some of which he wrote himself, and then the whole package was thoroughly tarnished by damning allegations against his politics, his attitudes toward women, and his personality, a good many of which are probably quite true. Hemingway has already been thoroughly praised, of course, but that’s only part of the difficulty. I’m going to try to do something that is becoming increasingly difficult, which is to praise Ernest Hemingway. Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises The Magician King by Lev Grossman (Viking, 2011)Īuthor of the just-published The Magician King, Lev Grossman joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry with this appreciation of what Ernest Hemingway accomplished in his first novel-and never quite did as well again.
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