Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises

Fiesta is divided into two books with the same characters featuring in each. Book one is set in Paris where we meet our characters who are all, without exception, wealthy ex-patriots living on money sent from home who do little but socialise in Parisian cafes and bars drinking copious amounts of alcohol. At the beginning of book two the characters head to a small Spanish community to take part in the upcoming fiesta. In the second book we get to see a little more of their personalities and the nature of their relationships which change drastically from amiable drunkenness and slurred promises to jealousy and violence.

Fiesta is somewhat of an enigma to me. On the surface it seems straightforward enough but I can’t help feeling it has a depth of meaning which is certainly beyond me on a first reading. At the beginning I found the main characters to be largely unlikable. None of them seem to contribute anything useful to society; they drift from one party to another getting drunk and generally wasting their lives. Despite first appearances there are complex relationships within the group which become more obvious and in-depth as the story progresses. As is typical of Hemingway’s unique style he gives you the bare minimum to go on and allows you to build a lot of the detail up for yourself once you get to know the characters which happens surprisingly quickly.


By the second half of the book the characters arrive in Spain to enjoy the bullfighting and non-stop partying which form part of the fiesta celebrations. The main female protagonist, Lady Brett Ashley, has slept with most of the group and would certainly have slept with the main character, Jake Barnes, if he didn’t suffer with impotency issues. They tell each other numerous times they are in love yet Brett is not interested in a relationship with Jake because he cannot satisfy her sexually. Brett appears to have no emotional attachment to the men she beds and views the sex as merely casual, this has far reaching affects when one of the group sleeps with Brett and believes it to be more than a fling which results in him being ostracised by the rest and treated as an outcast.

There was a rather unpleasant thread of racism within the story which cropped up from time to time mainly, but not exclusively, anti-Semitic in nature and after carrying out some research I was interested to note that critics at the time of the book’s release even accused Hemingway openly of being anti-Semitic himself. Make of that what you will.

Ultimately I was left satisfied with how the book ended. There were very few surprises and once you got to know the characters their actions were quite predictable and I saw the ending coming a mile away. Despite my largely negative feelings towards the characters I found them fascinating and towards the end the book was quite difficult to put down. I was surprised to find my attitude towards the characters changing. At first I was quite appalled by their lifestyle but then by the end of the second book I found myself pitying them. Their empty lives made me grateful to have a family. I suppose if a book makes you grateful to live the life you do it can’t be a bad book.

Since finishing the book I find I think of the characters and their fate quite often. Overall a very interesting, intriguing book I would definitely recommend and will read again someday.

Final verdict 4/5

Chris

Off we go...

Well it's that time of year again when we say goodbye to the 21st century for a week and rough it in a cottage somewhere. We're going on a trip to the west of England for a brief holiday and to celebrate our son's second birthday. Unfortunately there is no internet access whatsoever so we won't be posting anything on the blog during our absence.

The good news is we are taking plenty of books with us so there will be lots of activity here when we return (try not to miss us too much!)

Chris & Jess

Literary Blog Hop

We haven't participated in a blog-hop for months now but we couldn't resist taking part in The Blue Bookcases literary hop. Even if you have no interest in participating its worth checking out the other links just to look at other blogs which come under this category.

The question for the blog hop is;

Please highlight one of your favourite books and why you would consider it "literary."

Of course this question only brings up the further question of what is literary. My source of all knowledge Wikipedia classifies literary as 'focusing more on style, psychological depth, and character, the plot may or may not be important. Mainstream commercial fiction focuses more on narrative and plot'.

That sounds about right although I did like someone's answer on yahoo answers who said 'a book is classed as literary when its on the spark-notes website'. Chris even joked that he classifies something as literary when he finds it hard to read.

On that note we have both listed our most hardest book that we liked. A book that despite being sometimes difficult was in fact worth it in the end.

Jess's choice

The Turn of the Screw



The hardest book I have read is actually Moby Dick but I couldn't finish it (and not did I like it) so this is my choice. Ok so this one is a stupidly short one but believe me it felt as times like I was taking on a 500 page epic. The writing I found flowery and heavy and was not what I would consider an easy read. After saying that, I found parts of it quite creepy and I enjoyed the overall story of the governess as she looks after two slightly odd and possibly demonic children.

Chris's Choice

Lord of the Rings



Technically this is cheating since the book is, in fact, a trilogy; The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King all written by J.R Tolkien. To be fair my copy is all together in one book so I guess it's not cheating too badly.

I found the book challenging for numerous reasons but the most obvious would be its sheer size. At 1216 pages it isn't exactly short and took me some months to drag myself through. The depth of the story and the characters in it are breathtaking. I'm sure there is no book like it in the world. Unfortunately there are a lot of characters and it became quite difficult to remember them all, particularly as none of them are found in the English language. At points it felt like entire chapters were dedicated to describing a landscape or a castle which isn't the kind of writing I appreciate. I stuck with it because it is such a wonderful and exciting book and Tolkien really did have the ability to transport the reader to another place. I loved 'The Hobbit' (a much shorter book) and had to know how the adventure would end. Hopefully some day my son will allow me to read it to him at bedtime but until then I doubt I'll have the courage to attempt it again.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

After reading and very much enjoying Beloved I decided to read Toni Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye.

The Bluest Eye is a heartbreaking read about an eleven year old black girl Pecola who believes that if she was beautiful then all her other problems will go away. This belief is quite common amongst little girls but the problem is that in Pecola's world (1960's America) the 'standard' beauty that Pecola aspires to is to have the blue eyes and beauty of Shirley Temple.

Surprisingly the novel does not focus on Pecola (who turns out to be the least developed character in the book) but instead gives a voice to some of the characters who live the community in which Pecola lives and it follows their lives up to and after the shocking events that happens to Pecola.

The characters were all troubling and thought provoking (especially Pecola's mother) and at times the narrative changes from the third person to the first in order to give a certain character a chance to speak for themselves. For such a short novel there are a lot of different events and themes but I didn't feel as though anything was irrelevant and some of the various back-stories proved to give insight to later events.

I thought the image of beauty that Pecola has in the novel an interesting one. If Pecola did have blue eyes then she would look more freaky than beautiful which just goes to illustrate how she has not found her own idea of beauty because she is unable to see it in her own world.

When I first finished this book, I did have one or two small criticisms but now I'm writing this review I honestly can't remember what they were, the overall theme and the heartbreak has stayed with me rather than the negative.

Would I recommend this? Well I think you can guess that this isn't exactly a book filled with poops and giggles and is not considered Morrison's best but overall I found it very thought provoking and I can recommend it.

For those who are interested in reading Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' I will compare the two in quick summary;

I didn't find The Bluest Eye as rewarding or as thought provoking as Morrison's Beloved (which won her the 'Pulitzer Prize') but it is a much easier read than Beloved in terms of the prose style.

Verdict 4/5

Posted by Jess

When your opinion goes against the masses....

When I reviewed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon in my previous post I was certain of one thing; that the comments would be filled with people declaring their love for the book in response to my rather less than glowing review.

Sometimes it's like that with this blog lark; Chris and I have always been willing to post negative reviews here, if we feel they are deserved, but sometimes we read a book which has had rave reviews everywhere else but for one reason or another it comes up short for us. We are sometimes left wondering if perhaps we missed something.

This is meant to be quite a light hearted post BTW, a mere musing. People who disagree with our posts are always very polite when they say so and there are no issues with that whatsoever. I say that in-case your wondering if something sparked this post!

So just for fun we have listed here some other books which we have really not liked but everyone else seems to have loved;

From Jess

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

I could just about put up with the needlessly gory details of what happens to a human being when they burn alive and I could put up with the ENDLESS descriptions of food which went on in this book but what I could not put up with was the ending which explained bugger all.

The World According to Garp by John Irving

I hated Garp and this was my main problem with this book. I hated him so much that when his wife had an affair I thought 'good on you girl, that'll show him'.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I didn't hate this one, in fact I liked it but for the life of me I can't understand why people love it, for me it was just alright.

From Chris

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My God but didn't everyone make a fuss over this book. Even Jessica succumbed to the hype. When I declared to her that I didn't like the book she looked at me as if I had told her I was pregnant then said indignantly “Well, you're the only person in the world who doesn't like it”(A statement which I have since discovered is untrue)

I found 'The Road' to be largely boring, bleak, depressing, almost utterly without hope and suffering from a severe case of poor character development. Overall I found the story to be a meandering mess which was always going to end badly.

Don't lend this to someone with depression, you'll drive them over the edge.

I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti

I reviewed this book recently and found the comments I received were mainly from fans or people that had heard positive things about it. I couldn't (and still can't) see what the fuss was about with that book. The characters, without exception, were unlikeable. The plot was nonsensical and the overall ending deeply unsatisfying.

Slaughterhouse 5

Ah, one of my most hated books. I could easily write a ten page review on how naff this book is but I will just highlight a few of my biggest bugbears. The main character was infuriating and completely mad, the story was ridiculous, the phrase 'So it goes' is repeated over and over and over until you want to burn the book (it appears 116 times in 150 pages) the story is disjointed and difficult to follow. Then the author beings to bash the allies for bombing Dresden during the Second World War before falsifying the numbers of casualties the Germans suffered during the raid and calling the bombing “the greatest massacre in European history” Vonnegut was a fool. Even the man himself branded Slaughterhouse 5 a “Failure” he was right about that at least.

For every one hundred people that loved The Time Travelors Wife, there is always someone else (my mum being one of them) who couldn't finish it. A book on Amazon could have three hundred five star ratings and yet still have thirty one star ratings. We hope that anyone reading our reviews will always check out other opinions (unless the reader knows our tastes quite well) because when it all boils down to it, this blog is just our opinion, plain and simple.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

I read this as part of a read-along organised by English Major's Junk Food and was a great excuse for me to read this one which was on my TBR list.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer prize in 2001 and at over 600 pages (with quite small writing) in which themes of sexuality, death and the holocaust feature this is a book I was looking forward to reading and getting stuck into.

There are two main protagonists, Jewish cousins, Sam Clayman and Joe Kavalier. The novel starts when Sam is woken in the middle of the night by his mother who introduces Joe who has escaped from Prague just before the start WWII. Together they end up taking the comic book world in New York by storm with their character the escapist used to wage their own personal war on the Nazis.

There characterisation of the two protagonists is wonderful who throughout the novel become rounded figures complete with their own likeable and more dislikeable traits. The pain that Kavaliers feel as his family including his young brother are left back in Prague is heartbreaking and Claymans confusion over his sexuality is nicely played out.

While the novel started off promising and which included a daring escape from Prague, from about page 100 it became (and I hate to say this) a bit of a chore to read. There was nothing wrong with the writing or plot exactly but for a few hundred pages the novel just seemed to ‘plod’, it was laboured and it felt too long. It did pick up again about 150 pages from the end and I did find the ending quite touching but by that point I think the author lost me abit.

Would I recommend this? This is certainly a highly original book and aside from the middle section I quite enjoyed it. I think its best to check out other reviews like this one as perhaps this is one which just didn't fully work for me.

Verdict 3/5

Posted by Jess