(This review is based on the Arrow Classic edition of the book)

Four years ago, I wrote a terrific review for this very novel, and it shames me to this day. I reread "The Sun Also Rises" last week, and to my surprise, I adored it. I remembered having experienced utter boredom the first time around, but now I know it was only because I did not know how to read, obviously.

Hemingway's use of economy of words and understatement are things you must be aware of, which means: simply because the style appears simple does not mean the text is. There is a lot more than meets the eye, and for this, one may easily miss out on the essential heart of the novel. This is certainly what I did on my first reading.

Short sentences perhaps tend to make the reader read faster, and that would be a fatal mistake with Hemingway. Because you have less, you must pay more attention. The narrative will not give you chewed meat: you have to do your own chewing. And this is Hemingway's strong point and trade-mark, and narratively speaking, it works wonders if you work with it. I was of the mind that his style only really worked for short stories, but "The Sun Also Rises" proved me wrong. This is a powerful novel, highly enjoyable, and a landmark in worldwide literature.

Certainly one of Hemingway's best, and one of those novels you must read!

PS: the Arrow Books edition contains numerous typos of the embarrassing type, not that they make funny new words, but "gve" instead of "give" is relatively awkward to find in a book, so are misspelled names and the likes, or forgotten quotation marks, all of which appear in the Arrow Books edition of the novel.