The Sun Also Rises

This was a bookclub sidequest and all I knew going in was that the plot somehow involved bullfighting and that this book is important. I got to the end of this pretty short novel and thought to myself, “Ok a bunch of 30-somethings go on a week-long bender in Pamplona and Jake is obsessed with manly shit (bullfighting) and why is he not with Brett if they are in love?” WTF? Also yes apparently nobody likes Jews, some N-bombs are dropped, its the 1930s (ish) so racism is kinda normal. Other than that prose is clean and the dialogue is terse which is the famous Hemingway style. After some retroactive googling a light dawned. There are three (only three) passages that allude Jake’s injury and are not at all specific but it is implied that he has been rendered impotent during the war (WWI that is). At that point my lifelong accumulated understanding that the-first-world-war-was-an-industrial-meatgrinder-of-humanity kicked in allowing me to realize that all of the party-goers in this book either had PTSD or were suffering secondary effects and that Jake, as man who can no longer reproduce, has had to reconstruct his identity from chewing gum and popsicle sticks, I mean what is a man without (the ability to use) his penis? It all made sense and I still feel the horrific sense of psychic freefall. If I had known up front the essential gotchas of the book I think that innoculation would have either stopped me from reading or made the exercise more muted in its effect. At the time of this book’s publication, with readers who lived through the war-period, I can imagine that the book was a real soul crushing experience.