A Farewell To Arms
Ratings307
Average rating3.7
Overall I thought this was an excellent read. I enjoy Hemingway's style of writing encouraging the reader to read between the lines. The book mainly talks about events leading up to the plot and at times can get tedious. The plot and ending, however, is true to Hemingway's character.
I see how feminists would come to hate this book, and it is only because they overlooked the signature: that the book provides so much honesty in the dialogue while being a step away from reality. Yes, Catherine Barkley may have sounded so shallow; however, Frederic Henry was also presented above the machismo standard, as emphasized by his lack of feelings for the baby.
Another juxtaposition that stood out to me was of war and childbirth – both of heavily varying nature but bringing along with them the same kind of grief, suffering and death.
And as always, I am captured by the style of writing by Hemingway, which is a mix of heavily descriptive prose and blunt poetry. So many lines that brought me goosebumps.
I cried at the end.
Contains spoilers
It throws me off how many times Catherine says “You’re awfully good to me” or the word wonderful.
I see how much he wanted to speak other languages, because on The Sun Also Rises the narrator speaks Spanish, and here the narrator speaks Italian.
Also, the way he writes his females is just unrealistic. But how much his character drinks is probably realistic. I also didn’t expect him to acknowledge it in this book.
I don’t like how he never tells how he feels. He’s literally rowing for his life, and he just says he feels tired? What is that?
They enter Switzerland and just order something with no trouble for language?
Of course she dies.
The best thing about the book was Rinaldi, by war.
Oh my god what an awful ending! Wishing I wasted my time elsewhere...
Very bored to start with but picked up about 60% through. The end really got me! Beautiful and sad.
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. ... 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 such hurry.” (Hemingway 249)
good - okay - really good
pinche final
Hemingway entiende que las palabras deben de ser simples y ser usadas como dagas
I wanted to like this book. But the dialogue is so choppy, and clunky, and it drags on. And the descriptors are such terrible run ons. I felt like the main character had no real personality traits, nor did the supporting characters. Some of the depictions of war were good.
I loved this book. Perhaps it was a tad slow at times (for instance, he spends a long time in the hospital) but aside from that it's great.
Will it ever be over?
Except for a few clunky romantic dialogues, which, to be fair, might've been a reflection of the time, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. This read way better than Old Man and the Sea, which I have to revisit to see if I've changed my opinion on it. There was the bit about horse racing that went a tad too long I felt, but without that we wouldn't get the gem of a phrase ‘throwing benches'. The action hurts physically sometimes, the deaths come out of nowhere and still you have to perform duties as if it's normal life. Sentences were simple yet carried so much weight, I shudder at how much effort went into editing this book.
It's life, it goes on.
Interesting tour of Italy during WWI but that's about all I can say for this. I read this because I was interested in learning more about Hemingway's style, specifically his sentence construction, which incidentally was one of the best parts of the book as it was an enjoyable and easy read my eyes glided through the text easily. But story-wise everything about this book felt hallow, there were a few sequences that I felt accurately depicted the horrors of war but these seemed to be cheapened by the very shallow interactions and romance between Frederick and Catherine.
As Italian, I found pleasure in all the Italian locations of this book. Apart from this aspect, the book flows by pretty quick, it is romantic and well written and describes some human aspects of the war in a skillful way. I enjoyed it but I did not find it memorable.
I am left with very mixed feelings. I found the ambulance/army episodes realistic and believable, so completely in contrast to the awful romance scenes and dialogue.
I have not read any Hemingway since The Old Man and the Sea in high school, and that made hardly any impression on me at all; so we may as well say that this is my first exposure to him.
I certainly understand why the parodies of his writing are as they are, why he is considered so easy to imitate for humorous effect, but My word! how far superior to him imitators is Mr. Hemingway. His writing captures, with the fewest words possible, exactly each place and person and feeling. Without any obvious attempt, Hemingway depicts bleakness and self-pre-ocupied love and war-torn scenery so clearly that it quite took me away from home to Italy of a century ago.
I thoroughly enjoyed A Farewell to Arms and intend to read at least For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The war story deserves 3 stars. The rest of it - the romance, Catherine Barkley, the dialogue, the ending - gets NO STARS, and I threw the book across the room as soon as I finished.
Aaaaaaaughhhaaaaaaaaahhh.
“A Farewell to Arms” is a largely biographical depiction of Hemingway's experience as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, as well as his romance with a nurse who cared for him during his recuperation from injuries sustained during a mortar attack. During a tour of his childhood home in Oak Park, IL several years ago, I learned more about Hemingway's WW1 life and was intrigued to read “AFTA.” However, I didn't get around to it until my Great Books book club selected it for the November read (Veteran's Day!!).
Interestingly, many reviewers have commented on their displeasure with yet another prototypical Hemingway hero. Frederic Henry does display some “manly” characteristics, but often these behaviors often arise in the face of fear and uncertainty. “Manly” behaviors are expected of soldiers in wartime. Was Frederic Henry really brave? Or was he just a human in a rather scary situation, sometimes sitting and waiting for hours, making pasta in a tin bowl (or was it a helmet?), foraging for wine in abandoned farmhouses. He didn't always exhibit grace under pressure, Hemingway's hallmark character trait, such as the quite shocking scene in which one of his fellow soldiers is shot for attempting to desert. Really, Hemingway uses the novel as a vehicle to show just how tedious and troublesome war is. It is not glamorous. It is not something over which soldiers have control regardless of their individual bravery. It changes participants in ways they would rather not be changed, both physically and mentally.
Love, similarly, isn't shown as perfection and happy frolicking in a meadow, despite some rather idyllic scenes for Frederic and Catherine. Well, I don't know how idyllic hospital sex is night after night, but it was likely a reaffirmation of life after seeing so much carnage. Their relationship begins as a game and a rebound , develops into true feelings masked by sometimes flippant banter, and then ends tragically. Some might argue that Frederic never really loves Catherine, isn't terribly upset about their child being stillborn, and uses their relationship as an escape from the vagaries of war. But, maybe his seemingly cold reaction at the end are a form of shock after the one-two punch of both his child's and his love's death following up the initial PTSD caused by WW1.
All of these themes are encompassed in Hemingway's sparse, journalistic writing style, which really keeps the pace of the novel moving and makes the reader feel as thought they are there on the battlefield, in the hospital, on the lake escaping to Switzerland. His modernist reaction to his mother's wordy Victoriana certainly shows in this novel. Some folks now find his rat-a-tat phraseology jarring and annoying, but I found it tight and full of meaning. His minimalism took ages to craft and isn't as simple as the reader at first may think. While the dialogue may seem a little dated, it is representative of how an average person talked at that time, including slang.
PS - I should have written my review when I finished the novel instead of waiting a week and a half. I know I had more to say, so I hope to come back and update the review if my brain remembers what particularly struck me.
Le premier roman d'Hemingway que j'avais lu m'avait déçu, celui-ci m'a semblé justifier la réputation de grand de la littérature américaine de son auteur. L'horreur et l'absurdité de la guerre sont parfaitement décrites dans ce roman.
The first Hemingway I read and it has to be about WWI. Well, besides this, it didn't really impact me a lot. Some parts were written very well, other parts felt like a big page filler. Overall it felt like a good book, but not more than that. Still, it gave me an interesting in reading more from Hemingway, so from this point of view not all was lost.
I've read many of Ernest Hemingway's most revered short stories, and I've read one of his more acclaimed novels, The Sun Also Rises. I like Hemingway for the most part. He wrote good stories, but the style was very bare. I think Hemingway tried to strip down his stories as much as possible and, though he was good at it, this has always annoyed me a little. When I'm sipping coffee and nibbling on doughnuts with fellow literati, we make jokes about various authors. I often crack jokes on poor Hemingway and his pronoun-leading sentences.
Well, the joke is on me.
A Farewell to Arms is a tremendous novel. It employs Hemingway's signature simplicity, but it is not as simple as I remember Hemingway's other works being. He used elegant language and description more freely, but never more than you'd expect from Hemingway. This blend makes for a wonderful novel, a novel that lets the story and the characters speak for themselves. It is well-casted, well-plotted, and paced perfectly. It is thrilling and heartbreaking. This, for me, was a surprisingly good novel.
Now, I wasn't a big fan of Catherine Barkley and without reading other reviews, I would guess, aside from the ending for some, this is the most griped about element of this book. Hemingway was “a man's writer” and his life story portrays him as machismo, but Hemingway could still write a descent female character, certainly better than some others. Catherine was not one of these. She's weak and annoying and ignorant; yet she's strong, entertaining, and very intelligent. Perhaps Catherine was a bit crazy, a bit damaged. Now if Hemingway wrote all his female characters this way, I would assume he was just an idiot. Since he doesn't, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. There may be people like Catherine in the world, but with Hemingway's bare style—refusing to explain Catherine—I struggled to understand her and had difficulty getting past her juvenile dialogue. What was it that Frederic saw in her?
Catherine aside, which admittedly is a large part of the book, I thought A Farewell to Arms was spectacular. It's real and it's memorable. Is Hemingway over-hyped by academia? Absolutely, at least in my experience; but that's not to say that he wasn't a really great writer and master of the pared down narrative. So I'll be more careful about the Hemingway jokes. Orwell is easier to poke fun at anyway.
After reading “To Have and Have Not” I was kind of done with Hemingway. Thus when a friend of mine suggested this book I was hesitant to say the least.
What a pleasant surprise I found waiting in the book for me. A story of war, a story of romance. And little of the selfish one can find in the above mentioned.
This book takes you to the depths of the Great War. Hemingway semi-autobiographically has made a first person character who is an ambulance driver at the Italian war front.
The Great War always baffles me, as it seems no-one was really keen on fighting and no-one knew exactly what was going in. This book exemplifies this perfectly.
The subtle and the featherweight sentences of Hemingway convey more power than other hefty and lengthy sentences by other greats in literature. A good book, a beautiful story.
