Rating: 
Summary: The perfect, most welcoming, introduction to Hemingway.
Review: Sun Also Rises
The sort of book where the characters move from one place to another, in an endless party - which perfectly characterises the left bank of Paris in the 20's, where the novel opens, and the endless party of the Fiesta in Spain, where the characters make their way to.
Its undercurrent of lost and unrealised love has immense appeal. The relationship between the inimitable Lady Ashley (a character with as much appeal as Holly Golightly - Hemingway hated Capote, so would turn in his grave at this comparison) and the narrator, Jake Barnes is surely one of the most interesting in all literature.
The pure beauty of this novel can be put very simply: instead of almost every other book, where the reader is told what they should feel about every little moment, the reader is how put in the position of a film viewer: they are permitted to look at scenes and think: "ooh, what's he thinking now" or "she won't like that" or "does he love her?"
Put simply, The Sun Also Rises is so much fun to read because there is so much more for the reader to do, because Hemingway invented the art of not saying those things - and was good enough that, in this book, they all come across vibrantly.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Bad....
Review: The Sun Also Rises was my first sampling of Hemingway's novel length works. My verdict? Clearly, this is a first novel, but a very good one. The first half of the book is slow and not exactly compelling, and yet by the second half, it really takes off, and I found myself engrossed.Basically, The Sun Also Rises is a portrait of the "lost generation", those who were so impacted by the war that their lives have no meaning in the traditional sense. They go about a series of meaningless activities that leave them feeling empty and unfulfilled. This premise is fairly existential and dark, and if that isn't your cup of tea, don't bother with the Sun Also Rises. That said, this novel does a great job of characterizing such members of said generation, and the style of the writing is attractively lucid and crisp, yet rich with symbolism. Despite the shaky start, I would reccomend reading this.
Rating:
Summary: The bull and the myth and more bull
Review: This is the work that made Hemingway known to the world. It is his best piece of longer fiction. His best work is his stories. When he goes on too much he gets to the bull, and the bull is often too much bull for what he really has to say.
This is too the quintessential Hemingway. Jake Barnes is the wounded Hemingway hero who must act with the silence and dignity and not show his feelings'.He must not be like the Jewish Robert Cohn middleweight boxing champion of Princeton(Hemingway here displays the polite Anti- Semitism so common to his class in that time. Fitzgerald does the same in Meyer Wolfsheim world series scene in 'Gatsby') who cries and is sentimental, and thus violates the Hemingway code. "Grace under pressure" means admiring the bullighter who under pressure acts with the grace of minimum motion .It means for the code hero Barnes living his life with the same kind of emotional economy that the model bullfighter, sports hero , simple man of action does.
The whole Hemingway myth of heroism is in this work including the beautiful aristocratic rich bitch Brett Ashley whose impossible love with Barnes is the ' romantic story heart ' of the work.
My generation was raised to think of the Hemingway-twenties expatriate people as heroic forebearers. They seem to me now in the distance of time spoiled party-goers redeemed only by the masterful prose and perception of their creator. Hemingway read the Bible and out of it made a simple style of conjunctions. He made out of it a way of seeing and describing all his own. In doing this he did what most writers hope to do, and only a few can.
Hem could really write, and he could really describe with a kind of poetic intensity the details of the world he was perceiving. Despite my great admiration for the Nick Adams' stories, and my sympathy for the ' wounded Hemingway hero ' and my love of a number of other great Hemingway stories I simply find the ' myth ' and the Hemingway hero , an artificial construction contradicted not only by the author's famous boasting and bragging within the work and without, but by the much more complex world of living real characters American expatriate, or not.
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