Back in the late '90s, there was a book - I think it was an "Oprah's Book Club" kind of thing - that I couldn't read. Everyone raved about it to me. It was so damned depressing I couldn't get through the first few chapters. I wish I could remember the title, but I never returned to it. On the other hand, I read The Goldfinch and struggled because I couldn't stand any of the characters. I kept reading it because I felt I was supposed to appreciate this award-winning book. So I finished it and hated it (and honestly, I can't appreciate why it won awards). I should have stopped. Life is too short to read books that I don't enjoy or learn from.
As for Hemingway, those characters do remain rather lost, chasing the bull fighter across Spain. In Hemingway's life at the time, he was becoming known as a writer and he was, while still married to Hadley, flirting with wife #2, Pauline. Pauline and Hemingway's general crowd of friends at the time are all characterized in The Sun Also Rises. When he was writing the book, he became obsessed with bull fighting - a bit OCD, he would zero in on something - but he also lived in such a state of swinging from extremely happy with bravado and then so utterly depressed. I think you can see it in a lot of his writing - an undercurrent of sadness or the idea that something was lost.
There is a Colin Harrison novel that I stopped reading because of the accident that happens in the first pages. It wrecked me. I put it away for a long time. Then I returned to it after I'd read two of his other novels and liked them very much.
Back in the late '90s, there was a book - I think it was an "Oprah's Book Club" kind of thing - that I couldn't read. Everyone raved about it to me. It was so damned depressing I couldn't get through the first few chapters. I wish I could remember the title, but I never returned to it. On the other hand, I read The Goldfinch and struggled because I couldn't stand any of the characters. I kept reading it because I felt I was supposed to appreciate this award-winning book. So I finished it and hated it (and honestly, I can't appreciate why it won awards). I should have stopped. Life is too short to read books that I don't enjoy or learn from.
As for Hemingway, those characters do remain rather lost, chasing the bull fighter across Spain. In Hemingway's life at the time, he was becoming known as a writer and he was, while still married to Hadley, flirting with wife #2, Pauline. Pauline and Hemingway's general crowd of friends at the time are all characterized in The Sun Also Rises. When he was writing the book, he became obsessed with bull fighting - a bit OCD, he would zero in on something - but he also lived in such a state of swinging from extremely happy with bravado and then so utterly depressed. I think you can see it in a lot of his writing - an undercurrent of sadness or the idea that something was lost.
There is a Colin Harrison novel that I stopped reading because of the accident that happens in the first pages. It wrecked me. I put it away for a long time. Then I returned to it after I'd read two of his other novels and liked them very much.
Thanks for sharing!