and also less fishing.

Yeah, well, there couldn't be MORE.

I am wondering why The Sun Also Rises catapulted Hemingway to the position of "the preeminent writer of his time" according to the biography at the end when absolutely nothing of interest happens for the whole stupid book.

I highly recommend reading The Paris Wife. It is a fictional account of that time period when Hemingway was writing The Sun Also Rises told from his first wife's point of view. Yes, it is fiction, but it is said to be very well researched.

The Sun Also Rises has all that drinking. That's always a marker of preeminence.

I also am pretty sure that I did not understand that his "injury" resulted in impotence. I was never very good at getting the coded references to sex in books. Or really coded references to anything. I tended to take coded things at their face value, and explicit things as metaphor ( see how I missed the woman drowning herself in Kate chop ins Awakenings)

The Sun Also Rises has all that drinking

It does have that.

I also am pretty sure that I did not understand that his "injury" resulted in impotence.

I figured that out after the first oblique reference, and it was cemented for me in the second. So about 1/4 of the way through the book, I understood that. Then it went absolutely nowhere. The ending of the book is "Isn't it tragic that this woman I love and I will never be together because she really likes sex and I can't have it with her" which is exactly the theme of the book at 1/4 of the way through.

I love The Old Man and the Sea. Does anyone who hates that like any Hemingway novel? I can imagine hating it and liking some Hemingway short stories...

I am so happy I figured out how to read white font on my phone!!!

Keeping in mind that I read this book once, in 1994... I thought that he was being noble and not having sex, because he did not want to saddle the woman he loved with a husband who was injured (not in the penis). Which possibly made the book better

well, truth be told the ending is a bit different than that, right?

she claims, Gris, the same as you did, but the narrator's response is "isn't it pretty to think so." Acknowledging that there were greater barriers to their happiness than that. If such injury had not been done to the main character, I think we are to understand that their relationship still wouldn't have worked out. The two are self-destructive in such a way that would not have produced a solid coupling .

Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald on The Sun Also Rises, proposing a subtitle for the second printing: The Sun Also Rises, Like Your Cock If You Have One.

OMG flea!