About this title: Hemingway's second full-length novel, published in 1929, calls on his own experiences during World War I, when he worked for the Red Cross in Italy, was wounded after only six weeks on duty, and recuperated in a hospital in Milan, where he had a romance with a nurse. The blend of fact and imagination in A FAREWELL TO ARMS, however, is artful; Hemingway, who returned home after his brief experience, had to research the combat scenes, which were so convincing that many readers refused to believe he had not actually been a soldier in the trenches. The hero of A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Frederic Henry, ...
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Macmillan Pub Co
Date Published: 1987-03
ISBN-13:9780020519003ISBN:0020519001
Description: Fair. Used to be used by a high school so is quite worn altho binding is firm. Thanks for shopping at Peaceful Valley Homestead. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, NY, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1969
Description: Fair. Ex-Libris. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Cover is bumped, and worn. Pages are tight, browning with some pen marks. Signed by owner. read more
"A Farewell to Arms sort of gives you the inkling that Hemingway's death will probably involve a shotgun.
It's just that sad. Front to back, this is one of the more mournful novels I've read. It's about Henry, an ambulance driver in World War I. He is wounded and falls in love with Catherine, a nurse. They exchange odd banter. They fall in love in love during a summer in Milan (but who wouldn't?). He knocks Catherine up, then returns to the front. Unfortunately for him, he is fighting with Italians, and, as the Italians are known to do, he is soon in full retreat. (I don't know why the French get such a bad rap, the Italians haven't won a war since sacking Carthage). Henry is captured by military police and in danger of being executed, but he manages to escape. He reunites with Catherine and, inexplicably, ends up living with her in Switzerland. Things are idyllic for awhile. The lazy, languid life reminiscent of The Sun Also Rises.
Then, of course, life intervenes.
The end is tragic. Heartbreaking. The writing is brilliant, such as in Hemingway's famous line about how the world breaks us all:
"We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
There's no cynicism here, just bitterness. It's prototypical Hemingway. The sparseness and terseness interspersed with long, emotion-laden sentences. I place this in the middle of For Whom the Bell Tolls, which ends badly but is full of passion and love, and The Sun Also Rises, which is like an early 20th century The Real World."
"For those of you who didn't hear me babbling about this at SnB the other week, this is only the second Hemingway book I've ever read, although I've read a few short stories, and when I was like seven years old, we visited his house in Florida. It's a cheesy tourist trap filled with stray cats, so of course I loved it.
Basically this novel is his version of an unabashed love story, which means it's also sad, and there's a lot of drinking, and it's wartime in Italy (just pre America getting involved in World War I). The romance is between an American ambulance driver and a British nurse and the amount of drinking is colossal. Seriously. If you attempted to ingest the exact amounts of liquor as described during a typical day in this book, you'd be dead. The description is sparse and the dialogue can get repetitive, but the action and behavior is extremely moving, and I preferred it to "To Have and Have Not.""
"I've never read any Hemingway, so I thought to myself, 'Self, that is probably something you should remedy.' And now there are a couple of hours of my life that I will never get back. The macho posturing, the awful dialogue (if it were possible to have excised every word he put into the mouth of Catherine, I would have done so), the misogyny, the sometimes bizarre interactions between people... whatever the hell he was trying to do, for me it read as if everyone was either: 1) Certifiably insane, 2) an alien with no knowledge of human interaction or 3) a certifiably insane alien with no knowledge of human interaction. A vapid book full of vapid people."
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