The Sun Also Rises

They dance around each other in the cafés of Paris, these wounded expatriates, then flee to Spain where the bulls at least know what they want. Jake Barnes loves Brett Ashley with a ferocity that his war-ravaged body cannot act upon, and Brett loves him back with a cruelty that only the truly devoted can inflict. The journey to Pamplona becomes something between a funeral procession and a wake: drinking, watching men kill bulls in the afternoon sun, while the void the Great War left in all of them gapes wider each night. Hemingway strips his prose down to its tendons. No one says what they mean. The silences carry more weight than the dialogue. What remains unsaid between Jake and Brett, what Robert Cohn cannot understand about any of them, what the bullfighters understand too well, all of it lives in the white space on the page. This is a novel about impotence in every sense: the physical, the emotional, the spiritual bankruptcy of a generation that believed in something and watched that belief die in the trenches.