The writer and historian Katherine Pangonis first read The Sun Also Rises at 16 from a sun lounger in southern France, and has returned to it ever since. When its centenary arrived this year, Jake Barnes’s journey to Pamplona came to mind. So on July 2nd, four days before the fiesta that inspired Hemingway’s novel, she and her French boyfriend set off to retrace Jake’s route, armed with a picnic basket of French cider and crémant and a dog-eared copy of the novel.
“Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river.” That is what Ernest Hemingway wrote of Bayonne, in the French Basque Country, a century ago, and the assessment still holds. The River Nive flows between rows of white houses with dark-green and oxblood-red shutters, cafés spill onto terraces along the Quai des Corsaires, and everything feels freshly swept despite the heat. Red and green flags stir in a light breeze. My French boyfriend and I bicker as we cross a bridge over the river, fitting for a journey inspired by a novel about romantic tension. As penance, he buys me a pair of bright-red espadrilles. We are on our way to Pamplona.
