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“We came into the town on the other side of the plateau, the road slanting up steeply and dustily with shade-trees on both sides, and then levelling out through the new part of town they are building up outside the old walls. We passed the bull-ring, high and white and concrete-looking in the sun, and then came into the big square by a side street and stopped in front of the Hotel Montoya.”1

From the wondrously foreign streets of Pamplona to dreamlike Parisian nights to idyllic towns on the Spanish-French border, setting plays a vivid role in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway’s often sparse, matter-of-fact prose more evokes than directly depicts a rich sense of a postwar environment that today seems so foreign to us—a sense of forlorn desolation after wartime horror, a sense of lost hope in morality, of disconnect from home, country, and world. Drawn from Hemingway’s own experiences, the novel centers on Jake Barnes and his circle of likewise expatriate friends as they make their way to the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain. It is there, in Pamplona, that collides the unadulterated authenticity and honor of Spanish matador culture with the unrelenting immorality of the world just beyond. There, the characters find the meaninglessness and disillusion of postwar life reflected in the seemingly senseless brutality yet, paradoxically, unique beauty of the running of the bulls. There, Lady Brett Ashley—an archetypal 1920s flapper and object of the impotent but loving Jake—leaves her fiancé Mike for the young and artful matador Romero. There unfold the complex relationships and emotions of the various characters and, along with them, the nature of not only the characters but, moreover, the era as a whole.

The Sun Also Rises brought international attention to the Fiesta de San Fermín, and since the book’s publication in 1926, the festival has grown to attract as many as a million visitors each year during the weeklong celebration. Despite the popularity of the Sanfermines, today, bullfighting has become somewhat of a dying art, as economic downturn in Spain and outcry over its violent nature has seen it go from a thriving cultural engagement to a perceived superfluous activity, leaving many matadors unemployed. Yet the corridas are not altogether lost. Hemingway’s work forever captures and crystallizes in time not only this historic tradition against a colorful Spanish backdrop but also, perhaps more strikingly, the lost generation that existed through it.

Learn more about the Festival of San Fermín and Pamplona on Wikipedia. Find The Sun Also Rises at a local library or on Amazon.

1Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926. Epigraph. Print.

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