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zibjule's review against another edition
4.0
I just started reading Hemingway this year, after reading "Hemingway's Girl" as a guilty pleasure.
Wanting more, I figured I should read something *he* actually wrote and I started with "The Sun Also Rises," his first full-length novel. This book, "Everybody Behaves Badly," is a great follow-up to Sun, telling the behind-the-scenes story of the events that inspired the book.
The author doesn't glorify the Hemingway legend, instead showing how the legend started in the first place. The reader gets to know Hemingway and the whole literary Paris crowd by creating a cohesive narrative drawn from published interviews, as well as letters and books they themselves wrote.
Recommend if you have any interest in Hemingway, his Paris crowd, or if you liked the movie "Midnight in Paris!" ;)
Wanting more, I figured I should read something *he* actually wrote and I started with "The Sun Also Rises," his first full-length novel. This book, "Everybody Behaves Badly," is a great follow-up to Sun, telling the behind-the-scenes story of the events that inspired the book.
The author doesn't glorify the Hemingway legend, instead showing how the legend started in the first place. The reader gets to know Hemingway and the whole literary Paris crowd by creating a cohesive narrative drawn from published interviews, as well as letters and books they themselves wrote.
Recommend if you have any interest in Hemingway, his Paris crowd, or if you liked the movie "Midnight in Paris!" ;)
jenvogel80's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Infidelity, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Sexism, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Antisemitism, Cultural appropriation, Gaslighting, and Toxic friendship
lizbeth5's review against another edition
5.0
Not sure why I was drawn to this book, I read a review in the Boston Globe and then there it was on the library shelf. I am not a huge Hemingway fan, I can't honestly remember if I read The Sun Also Rises. What Hemingway I do remember I didn't terribly enjoy. It was the heyday of "women's lib" and Ernest was a bad man.
That being said, what a fascinating book! It is as much a study of 1920s to 30s Paris expatriate society as anything else. It shows a life and lifestyle few of us can ever know, whether by limits of income, or history. It portrays the life of a writer, a certain type of writer, surely, but still, that unscheduled, "life" that ends up as a piece of art.
Of course, it focuses on Hemingway as the traitor, if you will, using his "friends" and compatriots as fodder for his novel with no regard as to the consequences for their lives. And it is hard to imagine that their "adventures" we're so damaging to them when his book was published. In our time a group of friends going away together and drinking too much and sleeping around, isn't that a reality show? But once upon a time that behavior happened, but wasn't celebrated. And Hemingway became famous from publicizing it.
I highly recommend this book, for the literati of course, but also for the social historian.
That being said, what a fascinating book! It is as much a study of 1920s to 30s Paris expatriate society as anything else. It shows a life and lifestyle few of us can ever know, whether by limits of income, or history. It portrays the life of a writer, a certain type of writer, surely, but still, that unscheduled, "life" that ends up as a piece of art.
Of course, it focuses on Hemingway as the traitor, if you will, using his "friends" and compatriots as fodder for his novel with no regard as to the consequences for their lives. And it is hard to imagine that their "adventures" we're so damaging to them when his book was published. In our time a group of friends going away together and drinking too much and sleeping around, isn't that a reality show? But once upon a time that behavior happened, but wasn't celebrated. And Hemingway became famous from publicizing it.
I highly recommend this book, for the literati of course, but also for the social historian.
iceberg0's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting story of the writing of Hemingway's seminal novel.