My favorite book about food is The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. Of course, that book is about a lot of things — the lost generation, the impact of war, bullfighting, impotence — but most importantly, to me, it’s about the experience of an American eating and drinking in Europe.
Jake Barnes is the type of narrator I like. He doesn’t tell you much about what he’s thinking, and he never judges anyone. But he does give you all the facts so you can draw your own conclusions. He tells you how much money is in his bank account, everything that everybody says, no matter how drunk and obnoxious they get, and everything he eats and drinks.
The book proceeds in phases which to me feel a lot like the courses of a meal, as Jake and his coterie of expatriate Americans and low-level English nobility make their way around Europe, partying. They start with a strong apperitif in Paris, proceed on to a bracing fishing trip on the Irati River in the Basque country of Spain (oysters? ceviche?), then down to Pamplona for the bullfights (the pièce de résistance), then briefly to Biarritz for a bracing Atlantic swim (coffee) and, finally, a bittersweet reunion in Madrid with his brilliant, classy, uninhibited leading lady Brett Ashley (petit fours).
This being Hemingway, there’s minimal description of the food and drink, but he makes every word count. When he and his fishing buddy, Bill, leave two bottles of wine in a cold spring in the hills near the Iraty River and retrieve it at lunchtime, Bill takes a swig and says: “Whew! That makes my eyes ache!”
The greatest meal comes at the end of the book, in Madrid, at a restaurant that apparently still exists:
“We lunched up-stairs at Botin’s. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Brett did not eat much. She never ate much. I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.”
Yes, you read right. Three bottles of wine at lunch. For one person. Ok, perhaps the rioja alta was fairly low in alcohol (maybe), but he also had two martinis at the bar before lunch! Is that even physically possible? How much does he weigh? How can he stand up and go about his business?
I love to read about people drinking in books, because it feels like getting drunk vicariously, without the hangover or liver damage. One of my favorite characters for drinking vicariously is Tom Ripley, the sociopathic anti-hero of the Patricia Highsmith series (another American eating and drinking his way through Europe). But Jake Barnes’s three bottles of wine strain even my imagination.
On a recent visit to Key West, Florida, I picked up a Hemingway novel written there much later in his career: To Have and Have Not. It’s crap! (The movie version, by Howard Hawks with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is very loosely based on the novel, and is excellent.)
John Irving, in a Paris Review interview, opined that Hemingway and Fitzgerald got worse as writers as they aged, rather than better (as they should have), because their excessive drinking took a toll on their synapses. Comparing The Sun Also Rises to To Have and Have Not, I think Irving may have a point. What do you think?
farmhopper 