After finally finishing "The Sun Also Rises", I can say with full certainty that it was the most complicated book I have ever read. Most of the books that I have read before are much easier to grasp and understand from the get-go, and there has never been a book that I have had to go back and re-read certain passages from as many times as I had to for SAR. There were things that I both liked and disliked about this book.
My favorite part about SAR was that Hemingway had, for the most part, brief and concise sentences. There were very few huge blocks of descriptive text, so the book never lulled me to sleep. While the short dialogue sentences did not seem important at first glance, I liked how they had implicit meanings to make sure you were reading carefully. Even though I missed many of these when I first read through them, it still made for a fresh and unique reading experience.
Ernest Hemingway in Milan, 1918
Ernest Hemingway, Paris, circa 1924.
American Author Ernest Hemingway with then-wife El...Instead of forcing myself to suffer through page-long texts that did nothing but describe the minute details of something fairly insignificant, I got to read smaller and much easier sentences that had true meaning.
With these shorter and clearer lines also came another aspect of the book that I enjoyed, and that was the actual dialogue that took place between the characters. While some of it was confusing, I enjoyed how real and lifelike the characters seemed when they interacted. The way Jake spoke was different from the way Bill spoke, and you got different emotions from different pieces of dialogue. A lot of the dialogue scenes were just plain fun to read, whether it was Jake telling Robert to go to hell early in the book, or Bill telling Jake some...