Painting by artist Joseph P. Fernandez Jr.
“The bulls are my best friends.” I translated to Brett. “You kill your friends?” she asked.
“Always,” he said in English, and laughed. “So they don’t kill me.”
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Someone tipped me off about this travel blogger, my understanding is that he used to work for TimeOut Paris but was promoted to a gig for GoSpain.com. The story starts with a blow by blow of his daily life in Paris. He reviews a few restaurants, bars, hotels and dance halls. We get to hear some juicy details about his friends, who quite honestly seem like an unreliable bunch of alcoholic expats. Jake the blogger and his friends cougar Lady Brett, who seems a bit like Lady Gaga, Mike reminds me of Billy Connolly, Bill a sensible fellow, Robert, the butt of everyone’s joke and an addition of the absurd, Pedro the bullfighter, whom they meet when they all go to Pamplona for spring break to see the bullfights and party HARD!
This could all be true if the novel was set today. I think Jake would have been a first class blogger!
My favorite quotes:
“You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”
“Well,’ Bill said, ‘we might as well have another drink.’ ‘Damned good idea,’ Mike said. ‘One never gets anywhere by discussing finances.”
“(The) road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed animals.”
“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
