Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises

This book, one of Hemingway’s misfires, is the literary equivalent of continually feeling a drastic need to sneeze but never quite sneezing. It is evidently designed to sustain a tension submerged beneath Hemingway’s (in)famously crystalline prose, like seething currents beneath the frosted surface of a lake. In the end, however, all it accomplishes is frustrating banality. In Hemingway’s strongest work hidden resonances are at least as important the smaller number of words he does decide to use, like a lingering memory of the tolling of a bell.

Here, however, there are little to no resonances or depths, hidden or otherwise, and as such his scrupulously lucid and lucidly scrupulous style loses the animating spark of his best work. The characters are flat and unsympathetic, and the plot both meanders and flatlines. The novel, starting as it does with sense of building tension, has the skeletal outline of an exciting work of art. But Hemingway seems to have lost the confidence to give it flesh and bones, and as such it is one of his most uncharacteristically unsatisfying works.