Manuscript Notebook of “The Sun Also Rises” – NARA – 192680 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Sun Also Rises. It’s very good, of course. Superficially something like The Great Gatsby in that the first person narrator Jake Barnes is not the protagonist. Brett the fabulous woman who everyone falls in love with is probably that, but it’s the time and the place that stars, Paris, Spain, trout fishing, running with the bulls, a beautiful young toreador, the deadly horns, bar hopping, booze (lots of it), and the incomparable descriptions of all these.
So, you’re carried on a stream of long conversations, indelible images, and the same intoxication with their recklessness that readers have known for nine decades but which never fail to hold you. I went to Paris in 1960 and poked around in some of his old haunts. Maybe something would rub off on me.
