Hemingway and Spain

I just finished reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. An excellent novel, and I was especially interested because the book was set in Spain and described bullfights and fiestas. I lived in Mexico for five years where I taught Linguistics at a state university. My wife Elvira is from Mexico. I teach Spanish at a state community college. My wife's maternal grandmother, Elvira, was born in Spain and moved to Mexico, where she married Elvira's grandfather. Grandmother Elvira died young of tuberculosis, so Elvira never got to meet her. It is said that Elvira had flaming red hair. We have a black and white photo of her, so we can't really tell about the color of her hair. One of Elvira and my items on our "bucket list" is to travel to Spain, spend some time there travelling around and find some of her distant relatives. Her grandmother's maiden name was Franco, so I hope that we don't find that she was related to the fascist general and dictator of the same name. I also like to go trout fishing, so I would love to go fishing for trout in the mountains of northern Spain as Jake and his friends did in The Sun Also Rises. By the way, Jake sounds a lot like Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was a big fisherman and aficionado of bullfights.

I think the next Hemingway book I will read is A Farewell to Arms, a semi-autobiographical novel about an American ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.