The Sun Also Rises

There are a number of audio editions of Hemingway’s famous debut novel, many featuring actors as narrators. Michael Gandolfini (The Many Saints of Newark; Cherry) is the latest to narrate the 1926 classic. As a novel, it is a difficult script, a story firmly of its time, with offhand prejudices and a flatness to the presentation that creates reading challenges. The roman à clef is narrated by Jake Barnes, a member of the lost generation deeply damaged in World War I. He and a group of friends and acquaintances, including his former lover Lady Brett Ashley, are aimless, disillusioned, and adrift. Eventually they gather in Pamplona, Spain, to see the running of the bulls. The story circles around everyone’s desires and connections, and ends where it begins, with broken lives and empty hopes. Gandolfini’s reading is inconsistent. Voices change within a single character and merge between others. The pacing is also sometimes off, as are some pronunciations of place names. However, his removed, flat, overall narration does nicely match Hemingway’s spare and restrained style.