Boring Read
I picked up the Sun Also Rises as my first introduction to Hemingway. While I was very excited - I have to say however that I was fairly disappointed with this 200+ page novel. More than once during this novel, I had thoughts of putting it down never to return to it.
The pace of the book, extremely slow and methodical, make it very difficult to get through the whole story. The tone is fairly monotonous for most of the book with the plot unwinding in very ordinary fashion without much intrigue whatsoever.
I found the characters in the book to be a bit annoying - their excessive eating and drinking along with their rather quick, undeveloped dialogue proved difficult to digest. The characters appeared to avoid some of the major topics, situations and events that were laid out in the novel in favor of drinking, eating & socializing.
The saving grace of this book is Hemingway's depiction of bull-fighting towards the end. Even though many pages are not spent in this area, there was well-written, intriguing and even suspenseful prose in those bull-fighting pages.
The main reason I read this book through till the end was to find out how things would develop and end with the character Brett - and her relationship with Jake.
As I mentioned - however - the novel proved to be a disappointment.