There are possibly no two “classic” novels more different than Jane Eyre and The Sun Also Rises, and reading them one after the other gave me what I can only describe as literary whiplash. One is a Romantic, emotional and wordy “history of a woman’s heart” with good spiritual Victorian values, the other is a modernist, minimalist, hyper-masculine grit-fest about how everyone’s constantly drunk and sleeping with each other in a godless world.
Hailed by some as the greatest novel of the 20th century (whether or not I feel like it deserves that metaphysical medal, we shall get to in a moment), Ernest Hemingway’s first book drops the reader with no hand-holding, help or description beyond utter scene-setting basics in 1920s Paris. Our narrator is Jake Barnes, a World War One veteran who suffered an injury in combat that (though again, never actually described) seems to have damaged his genitalia. In the midst of a new, modern culture where everyone’s throwing off the values of the past generation and having affairs in all directions, it’s just one of the reasons he feels a little disillusioned and fed up with the state of things. Continue reading
The Afictionado 