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“Many people don’t appreciate what a big commitment writing this novel was for Hemingway. He was used to writing short stories. It meant he had to spend a lot of time on one book that could have been spent more profitably writing short stories. Like many of Hemingway’s later novels, it is stitched together from shorter pieces – in this case, what he’d already written about Pamplona…It can be summed up by the phrase ‘grace under pressure’, and looks at the code of ethics that emerges from bullfighting. It starts in Paris and then goes to Spain. The main event is a bullfight in Pamplona. The main characters are a group of expatriates, including a Jewish man, Robert Cohn, who was a boxing champion at Princeton. The narrator, Jake Barnes, was injured in World War One and his impotence is strongly suggested.” Read more...
The best books on Hemingway in Paris
Wai Chee Dimock, Literary Scholar
