“His prose is so unadorned and unshowy it’s practically ego-less—not a thing one usually hears said about Hemingway, but it’s true. He’s absolutely determined to get out of the way of what’s going on, to make the verbal membrane between you and the action so thin you can almost touch it, and he does.”
“This makes The Sun Also Rises sound like some kind of technical exercise. But what I really like about it is that nobody else describes the kinds of moments Hemingway does in that book: the interstitial, throwaway moments that are what life is mostly made of. You could redact all the stuff about bullfighting, and Jake Barnes’s missing penis—which let’s face it is all fine as far as it goes but it gets a little ridiculous—and you’d still be left with one of the most overwhelmingly human books ever written. You’d be left with the pretty prostitute who smiles, showing her unexpectedly bad teeth; and the Spanish peasant who takes a little more than his fair share of the wine; and Mike, husband of the faithless Brett, losing at poker dice and having to admit he can’t pay up; and the fat count twirling the bottles of champagne in the bucket of salted ice, and yanking up his shirt to show off his arrow scars; and Jake promising to be there at five in the morning for the start of a bicycle race, then waking up the next morning after the cyclists have already been on the road for three hours. The heart of the book isn’t bullfighting. It’s people doing their human best to have a decent time of it even as the abyss of sadness and death yawns beneath them, preparing to swallow them.”