Ernest Hemingway's great post-World War I novel, his first major work and the classic novel of the "lost generation," is a vivid exploration of the moral wasteland of Europe in the Twenties, and of the sterility and despair of postwar life. His hero, Jake Barnes, has suffered a war injury that has left him impotent. Hopelessly in love with the seductive and flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley, Jake leaves Paris to accompany Brett, her drunken fiance, and an American boxer to Pamplona, watching helplessly as she falls for a young bullfighter. The expatriate crowd that Hemingway portrays so vividly passes their lives in an aimless alcoholic haze, against which the local fiestas and the running of the bulls seem, by contrast, full of vitality--a quality that is alien to them. The settings are romantic--the bull ring, the Paris streets, the bars and cafes and hotels--but Hemingway invests them all with a disillusion that undercuts the glamour of expatriate life. When THE SUN ALSO RISES was published, in 1926, Hemingway, at age 28, was established as a rising literary star. He wrote the first draft in an astonishing two months: a feat made possible, no doubt, by his close identification with his desperate hero and by his urgent need to tell the story--and to articulate his own melancholy feelings about his generation: where it came from and where it seemed to be going. It was with this novel that he found not only his distinctive themes, but also his spare, lyrical voice--a voice that understands the power of the apt detail but also knows, unerringly, what to leave out.
Harry Morgan was hard - the classic Hemingway hero - rum-running, gun-running and man-running from Cuba to the Florida Keys in the Depression. He ran risks, too, from stray coastguard bullets and sudden double-crosses. But it was the only way he could keep his boat, keep his independence, and keep his belly full...
Quizá se halle el verdadero Hemingway más en sus historias cortas que en sus novelas largas, famosas en general por falsas razones. Algunos reproches -como el de la impotencia del corazón- no se habria podido formular nunca si se hubiera prestado suficiente atencion a ciertas pequeñas narraciones, como Los diez indios o En otro pais. Al igual que la valentia no significa ausencia de miedo, sino su control, la dureza en Hemingway no significa crueldad o falta de sentimientos, sino la coraza de un alma vulnerable.
'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.' Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the 1920s are deeply personal, warmly affectionate and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him - literary 'stars' like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein - he recalls the time when, poor, happy and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation.
Among Hemingway's last works, this chronicle describes his friendship with one of Spain's most celebrated bullfighters, and embodies all Hemingway's feelings about the sport.
Truman
