{"id":165,"date":"2023-12-01T10:12:15","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T10:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aerowalsh.com\/cr\/?p=165"},"modified":"2023-12-01T11:25:36","modified_gmt":"2023-12-01T11:25:36","slug":"thurs-30th-nov-fiesta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/?p=165","title":{"rendered":"Thurs 30th Nov – Fiesta"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Largely today wound around reading Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. When purchasing this book from Bondi Junction Harry Hartog (admittedly one of my least favourite bookshops), the bookseller remarked on this being his favourite Hemingway. Being my first, I was both pleased and wary to begin with the best. My hesitation being that if I was underwhelmed, a whole back catalogue is rendered useless to me. To think – at least 10 books in the world that I don’t want to buy – a true travesty! I became more dubious when the bookseller also said he was “too scared” to read the Joan Didion book in my pile and that he loved Bret Easton Ellis but that he hadn’t read Less Than Zero. I could teach this man a thing or two about his profession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book came on a recommendation from someone in financial markets who is on gardening leave (paid to go to the beach for three months). And it wasn’t so much of a recommendation as in the list of four fiction books he has read, one of which didn’t even end up being fiction and was instead “spiritual reflections of a Roman emperor”.

How enthralling. Hemingway has long sat a mystery on the shelves to me. In fact, I released I had confused him with Bukowski. In my imagination, this book would be a tedious treatise on bull fighting and drinking. The book ended up being a treatise on bull fighting and drinking, but was not tedious. Amazingly, there were a few very funny lines in the book, and I laughed aloud at some. Hemingway starts in seedy Paris, drives to the French country side for wholesome trout fishing, hurtles into Spain for a raucous fiesta and then drags us around the edges of all three a second time. The transitions in the book come at just the right pace. Any longer in the social stratification and scheming of Paris would have left me neurotic. A week more of the calm country side of just three men on a fishing expedition would touched blas\u00e9. An extra bottle of wine in the chaos of the Spanish bull fighting fiesta would have been nauseating. The novel is structured into three “books”. The relief of moving from the second (travels fishing and bull fighting, the latter of which is quite intense) to the third is divine (the fiesta is over, “it did not mean anything”). The narrator, Jake, moves from a situation where you can barely follow whether it is him or someone else entirely talking or fighting or trying to sleep with Brett, to one where he is by himself and in a state nearing convalescence. It was a brief recovery period for both Jake and myself, and it left me satisfied with the novel. Brett was generally a drag and every time she appeared I found myself checking my phone, but even she found something interesting to part with at the end:

‘You know it makes me feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s sort of what we have instead of God.’
‘Some people have God,’ I said. ‘Quite a lot.’
‘He never worked very well with me.’<\/em>

I am pleased I read this novel in this particular holiday, during a stormy few days in Randwick by myself. It is not a ‘beach read’ and it would have been terrible in Asia, being so European in thrust. I won’t rush to my next Hemingway but it is surely in my horizon, in the future, looming just off centre and coffee stained at a public library.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
I got a Banh Mi and an orange juice from Randwick Junction ($12 for both) for an early lunch and came down to Coogee to enjoy. The seagulls were brutal though. I got swooped the whole time and one actually stole a cucumber piece out of my Banh Mi. In the end it was a much more stressful lunch than I imagined.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
The weather needed to see a therapist today.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
“There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Randwick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4,11,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-holiday","category-review","category-summer-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/177"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}