More than once, I found myself repeating Jake’s apt description that “in Spain you could not tell about anything.”
#OPENIN SCENE OF THE SUN ALSO RISES HOW TO#
While the young bullfighter Pedro Romero was facing down death in the arena, I could not figure out how to use the payphones. While Jake and his friends seemed to float effortlessly across language barriers, I could barely “talk Spanish.” My challenges were not the stuff of literature, but the banal impossibilities of asking for directions or buying metro tickets. The doubled feeling of history in these places, both real and fictional, gave them a quality of super-reality, as if I could still feel the sustained attention of other minds in other times.Įlsewhere, the names of things remain maddeningly inaccessible. During the days, we walked along streets and plazas whose names I recognized: Puerta del Sol, Carrera San Jeronimo. Ready for some kind of “wonderful nightmare,” as Hemingway had described the fiesta and its long nights that ended as day broke, I was surprised to find restaurants stacking their chairs before midnight, the streets emptying soon after. Jake did not get much sleep either as his train pulled into Madrid, but at least he was conscious enough to notice the “compact white skyline on the top of a little cliff away off across the sun-hardened country.” I closed my eyes against the sunrise that flooded the sky with golden light, regretting each jolt the bus made on its climb into the city.Ĭomparisons only became more complicated once we arrived in Madrid. Somehow, the man behind us managed to go back to sleep - we could tell because he began snoring, as he would continue to do for the rest of the night. as officials, first on the French side, then on the Spanish, did cross-checks on everyone’s documents. While Jake had merely to show his passport and stroll across a bridge to get into Spain, we had to wait blearily in our seats at 1 a.m. This was the land of sunlight “hot and hard,” churches “cool and dim,” and everything surely louder and brighter than it is elsewhere.Īs we drove farther south, I leafed again through the book and made what comparisons I could. From a bus, however, Spain was still only an abstract concept, and even our descent into the country seemed rife with literary promise.
We would not be following Hemingway’s itinerary exactly we were skipping over Pamplona and San Sebastian and the meatiest chapters to blaze straight into the last scenes in the capital.
But even if we skimped on the feasts and booze, what the book could offer in terms of authenticity would surely more than make up for it.Īnd so, with no other direction, and no idea what we were getting ourselves into, we bought our tickets for the bus from Paris to Madrid. Add to that the questionable moral and economic conditions of many protagonists, and it may be difficult to see the point in invoking a writer when in search of a good restaurant - especially if you want to avoid becoming an alcoholic or blowing your budget of now-severely-devalued American dollars. Of course, any advice would be out of date by definition. But while psychological conditions make for a good story, I was seeking something more topical - dare I say, topographical?Īs we would also be starting in Paris and moving into Spain, Hemingway could serve as our guidebook. The characters - wounded, stoic veteran Jake Barnes unhappy, promiscuous divorcée Brett Ashley - define the generation of expatriates that Gertrude Stein named the Lost Generation. Their path takes them from Paris to Pamplona during the running of the bulls. The book follows expatriates drifting around Europe after World War I. Before I left, I visited the bookstore on a friend’s recommendation that I pick up a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. About to finish a summer session course in Paris, I had vague plans to spend time in Spain with my boyfriend. This was a good place to start what would become my own literary journey through Europe.
Upstairs, writers’ groups meet weekly in rooms lined with old books, and guest poets give readings to interested crowds. Alternative vacationers arrive in droves at the famous bookstore, to take pictures by the iconic green storefront and buy slim volumes by Ernest Hemingway or F. Eighty years after establishing itself as a meeting place for expatriate writers and artists, Shakespeare & Company is still doing good business in the Lost Generation.
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