SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
There's something timeless about being young, in love, a few drinks in and kind of mean to your friends. One of the most enduring renditions of that archetypal story is "The Sun Also Rises," the debut novel by Ernest Hemingway, which turned 100 years old this week. Here's NPR's Andrew Limbaugh.
ANDREW LIMBAUGH, BYLINE: Verna Kale was fresh out of college when she first read "The Sun Also Rises."
VERNA KALE: I was blown away by it. I probably liked it for the wrong reasons at that time in my life.
LIMBAUGH: She was on a train on her way to Spain when a friend lent her a copy.
KALE: No, I was a young confused person, and I felt like, you know, I didn't really know where exactly I belonged in the world. And I read this novel about a bunch of other young confused people who didn't know where they belonged in the world.
LIMBAUGH: Kale is now a professor at Penn State University and president of the Ernest Hemingway Society.
It's funny that you call that the wrong reason.
KALE: I think it's because maybe young people, when they first read this book, they kind of see a lot of the partying that happens in it and they think, wow, you know, that sounds fun or these people are really cool or something. And actually, you know, the characters themselves are damaged, unhappy people.
LIMBAUGH: The book is set post World War I, and it follows Jake Barnes hanging with his friends and frenemies. There's Robert Cohn, the pugilistic hanger-on. There's Bill Gorton, the loudmouth. And there's Lady Brett Ashley, the woman Jake loves, but they can never be together because Jake has a wound from the war that's left him impotent. The main crew of characters are American expats, first in Paris, then to Spain.
JOSÉ MANUEL DEL PINO: And the whole part set in Spain is just a festival of drunkness (ph) and festivities.
LIMBAUGH: That's José Manuel del Pino, a professor of Spanish literature at Dartmouth College specializing in the literary and cultural bridges between Spain and the U.S. And he said that, unlike Hemingway's later nonfiction work, "Death In The Afternoon," "The Sun Also Rises" introduced Americans to a relatively narrow, hard-partying vision of Spain.
DEL PINO: On one hand, it attracts people, and then it's good for the country. But on the other hand, many people go just to find those stereotypes that derive from the reading of that piece of work.
LIMBAUGH: Another part of the book's legacy is the racism, sexism, antisemitism and homophobia written into the text. One line of argument from academics is that Hemingway was only reflecting how people really were at the time. Debra Moddelmog, dean of Liberal Arts Emerita at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of many books about Hemingway, says, yeah, he is reflecting, but he's also doing something more than that. He's inviting readers to ask themselves...
DEBRA MODDELMOG: How does discrimination work? How does it transform people? How does it change them? And how does it change the people who participate in it?
LIMBAUGH: In the past 100 years, critics and academics have pored over the book's treatment of women, of nature, of war, of death, of faith, of booze, and all of that changes over time. But what's preserved in amber for Del Pino is the book's scent of potential.
DEL PINO: Reading "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway is like reading a novel by a young American writer who is really trying to become a great writer, but he doesn't know if he will accomplish it. But he did.
LIMBAUGH: Andrew Limbaugh, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BEATLES SONG, "HERE COMES THE SUN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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