Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Earnest Hemingway, 1926.

It is a generally accepted opinion that Ernest Hemingway was one of the finest authors ever to have lived. His most well known work, The Old Man and The Sea, is often mentioned in discussions as to the true ‘great American novel’, but while other such contenders by writers as renowned as Steinbeck and Fitzgerald are set in their homeland, Hemingway’s tells of one Cuban man’s struggle with the Caribbean sea, and life itself. 1927’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises was a forerunner of the aforementioned, and similarly was set overseas, in post-WWI France and Spain; Hemingway was to return to the Mediterranean in his work two years later, with A Farewell to Arms, a First World War tale of an American in Italy. Likewise, Fiesta is the story of an expatriate, Jake, and his hopeless love for beauty Brett, amid the Parisian, Pernod-sipping upper-classes, and his 'afición' for bullfighting in the dry, dusty streets of Pamplona, during the titular fiesta weeks in northern Spain.

34 year-old Brett is a compulsive adulterer, claiming (admittedly, believably) to be in love with Jake, while having open affairs with numerous men, all seemingly friends, all seemingly content with this arrangement, bar one, Jew Robert Cohn, disliked much by all characters, somewhat pitied by the reader. Instead it is Brett’s fiancé Mike who proves disdainful, a man who cannot hold his drink and regularly attacks boxer Cohn. The group of socialites consume vast quantities of alcohol throughout the novel, and never appear to work, despite their varying desgrees of financial stability.

Hemingway presents the ferocious bull running and fighting scenes of Pamplona with an unrestrained passion of the pastime, while heart warming descriptions of the Navarre countryside and its welcoming inhabitants serve to highlight the contrast between such a docile, simple existence, and the blood-stained sport that its proponents so adore. The Spaniards' subsistence and its perceived authenticity make the licentious Parisian elite seem shallow and false in the face of more genuine livings.

With his excellent command of the sparse prose and economic structures for which he was known, and a specificity unparalleled in literature, Hemingway manages to make atmosphere, ardour and infatuation teem throughout Fiesta, which may just come to be seen his masterpiece.