The sun also rises 1

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.

At the beginning of the book we get to know more about the main character’s best friend Robert Cohn who is an unsuccessful writer. His former wife left him a couple of years ago, when he was still living in America. After that he decided to move to Paris and that is where he met his current girlfriend Frances.

While trying to focus on his work, Jake meets a beautiful woman, Brett, who enchants him and totally blows him away by her beauty. Later on Jake finds out that she is going through a divorce and that she is moreover engaged to an another man. This makes Jake uncertain about their relationship, even though she keeps telling him that she loves him and he asks himself over and over again if she really does. Jake has a strange feeling, that they have met before and a feeling that everything he is going through with Brett, has happened before.

The book doesn’t tell me much about what’s going to happen, because it doesn’t really have a specific story yet. I found it a little bit boring at the time. Hemingway focuses more on Jake’s relationship to Cohn and Brett, whom we got to know quite well in the beginning. He describes Jake’s feelings very thoroughly. You can really see that Jake feels sorry for his friend Cohn, however, he cares too much about him to confront him about it. Instead, he just tries to help him as much as possible and tries not to think about the fact that his friend has changed a lot since he returned from America.

“Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip- over jersey sweater and a tweet skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.”  Page 19

This is from an extract at a bar where Brett catches Jake’s eye for the first time, and as you can see, he’s very fond of the way that she looks, which we think is the reason that he stays with her even though the circumstances. At the time it seems more like he likes the idea of having her by his side, more than he actually loves her, as an accessory.

The three first lines:

“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Priceton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He vared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as Jew at Priceton.”

The first three lines caught my attention immidiately, I found the topic very interesting but I also really wondered why Cohn boxes when he disliked it. In addition I was curious how Cohn could be a champion even if he didn’t cared for boxing. Often, people that are winners and champions love and enjoy what they are doing. Furthermore I thought this book would be about Cohn and his life, whereas later on it turned out to be about someone and something else.