After the Party
I don't really like parties. Well, that's not entirely true I like parties well enough but I tend to feel very crowded after a while and when I take a break from the party I get very pensive and lonely. It's the sudden change from "people" to "no people" that gets to me. That's what I found in the third and fourth chapters of The Sun Also Rises. Jake, because now he is actually given enough dialog to actually have his name used enough for me to remember it, ends up taking this girl Giselle to a party and they have a good time. She dances with some other guys and then his ex shows up. They leave the party early and catch a cab. They make out a little and then go to a different party with the same people. Jake leaves the second party really quickly and ends up alone at his apartment just thinking screw them all. It's something I have thought. You really can't control it when your friend or an old flame just does something to tick you off. And he ends up crying. It seemed really odd. I mean it wasn't a bad time for him to start crying. But I didn't expect it from Hemmingway. Hemmingway is a really tough kind of guy. He saw some of the worst of the Italian front of World War 1 as an ambulance driver. He was injured in Italy. So was Jake. But that's not what got to him. It was Lady Brett Ashley that got to him. I just never expected Hemmingway to have a character that is clearly a surrogate form him break down like that. But then again Hemmingway did kill himself so I guess it must have been something he did. He's just very frank about it. It doesn't sound like someone talking about crying. He's kind of detached. Well Brett comes back and she just talks a mile a minute. I was reading the book out loud and I couldn't keep up which is odd because it's a book and I can read at whatever speed I want and Hemmingway doesn't even mention how fast she was talking. I just got the impression that if I were to making the movie of this I'd want Katharine Hepburn to play her. They way she peppers her sentences with "chap" just makes them seem like she need to say that word to make sure she breathes. And then she leaves and Jake cries again. She must have been something really special. I haven't seen it yet. Right now the only extraordinary quality I have seen is her impressive lung capacity. I wonder why they can't be together. I've never been with a girl who talked as fast as Brett but she seems to be a very up-beat person. Those kinds of people are usually the ones who are hurting the most in my experience.
