A Farewell To Arms
by Ernest Hemingway

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• ISBN13: 9780684801469
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of A Farewell To Arms

Book Review: Great? Well, there is greatness in it-- and great imbalance
Summary: 4 Stars

There are some truly admirable sections in this book-mostly involving descriptions of men at war, in various phases-but these are not matched by the treatment of the central relationship in the novel, that of the hero and heroine. For all Hemingway's attempts to render the general human affliction of armed conflict something more personal and specific via the wartime romance between his two principal characters, the end result of "A Farewell to Arms" is that the reader is left less with a new appreciation of something profound and terrible than with an odd (and unfulfilling) sense of detachment from the human condition. One simply asks at the end: That's it?

The conclusion of the novel is clearly intended to be tragic: after surviving a series of wartime perils, the hero escapes to Switzerland with his pregnant common-law wife-only to see her die there in childbirth. Yet the feeling that we have never been allowed to know much about this character, Catherine the nurse-and therefore aren't in any better a position to mourn her loss (or learn from it) than is the benumbed hero, Lt. Henry, who simply walks away from her corpse-is almost as irritating as it is inescapable. The palpable tension of the striking war sequences and the couple's desperate flight to peace and freedom is thus followed (not to say trumped) by a deflatingly feckless conclusion that offers no more illumination of the great issues at hand (war/peace/life/death) than one gets from a vulgar bumper sticker. Do we really need Hemingway to tell us that Sh*t happens?

This just isn't, by any measurement, much of a love story. It has only a beginning and an (abrupt) end-its internal plot never thickens, it has no arc. The lieutenant enters the relationship with no intention whatsoever of falling in love; nurse Catherine, for her part, likewise seems more interested in companionship than love as such (having lost a fiance to the war earlier). But what ho, human nature does not yield to vain design, and the two somehow do fall in love-and in pretty short order. Fine, okay, the reader can live with the fact itself. The problem here is that neither the transition to nor the expression of the resulting (and all-consuming) love affair is developed or described in any real sense. The principals simply decide they are in love, and proceed to profess this feeling to one another in curiously disjointed (and sometimes painfully stilted) dialogue for the remainder of their time together in the novel.

The lieutenant specifically forbids himself thoughts of his beloved when away at the front, so we get no account from the first-person narrator of any growing feeling or new commitment toward her. Catherine's character lacks the dimension of interior monologue, of course, so we know nothing of her thoughts; adding to this distance, moreover, she is given a background even sketchier than that of the nearly-anonymous lieutenant, and her interaction with secondary characters fairly defines the term superficial. In short, we see nothing of Catherine save externals-and not much of those.

What we get when the two are together, alas, is not mutually-assisted self-exploration, or even mutual relationship development a la Rocky and Adrian ("We fill each other's gaps."). Nope, what we get is a great deal of chatting around things in place of talk about them: Henry does not articulate to Catherine either his feelings about the campaign horrors he has just been through (though she asks him to) or his feelings about her as such. We get a lot of very specific food and drink orders (especially the drink; hey, it's Hemingway) and a number of discreetly-placed scene omissions (when they're, y'know, doing it)-but virtually snot about why this is happening or what any of it means to either party.

Perhaps inarticulateness is the point-or at least a point-that Hemingway is trying to make: war renders every one of us less human, and the participants' reduced state (Be...less than you can be!) incorporates a kind of dumbing down of our desire and ability to communicate with one another, first on the level of nations, then as individuals. While this sounds good as a rationale, it contains one great whomping inconsistency: in his relationships with various secondary characters (the priest, several soldiers, Count Greffi), the hero clearly tries to articulate his feelings on a number of great issues. He will not let war silence his humanity. With the character he is supposed to love, however, and whose death is meant to affect us profoundly as the culmination of the novel, the lieutenant hasn't tried to articulate jack. He's just there. She's just there. It's a war. They're in love. They escape. She croaks anyway. That's a wrap. Strike the set. Chinese for lunch?

If the two lines above sound like a movie pitch-bingo. I doubt Hemingway set out to write a screenplay, but let's face it: movies thrive on striking externals, and this is a novel chock full of `em. Thrilling war scenes major and minor; a handsome young American in picturesque foreign locations; a tall, beautiful, and tragic (or at least "tragic") heroine. Color in a few of the omitted love scenes and you're ready to start shooting. You may even win some awards: there's just enough to think about here to raise the whole enterprise safely above criticism as exploitation-and even, in the eyes of some, to the level of art. If you're a producer, what's not to like? The surprising thing is that Hollywood has made this movie a mere three times to date (1932, 1957 and a mini-version in 1966). How long do we have to wait, I ask you, before we get to see Keanu and Uma in "A Farewell to Arms" for the new millenium?

In sum, this is not a great novel, but rather a novel with greatness in it-and a great imbalance between its strengths and weaknesses. If this imbalance finds redress in another medium (I haven't seen any of the films), swell. As a novel, in any case, A Farewell to Arms surely deserves to be read, appreciated and criticized on its merits, not as a proto-screenplay. So read it, appreciate it, criticize it. At the very least, its men-at-war scenes will grip and move you, as they have doubtless gripped and moved others for generations.

All told, I give it two Italian hand grenades up.

Summary of A Farewell To Arms

I wanted to do something for him. You see, I didn't care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know.

Hemingway was not known for either unbridled optimism or happy endings, and A Farewell to Arms, like his other novels (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and To Have and Have Not), offers neither. What it does provide is an unblinking portrayal of men and women behaving with grace under pressure, both physical and psychological, and somehow finding the courage to go on in the face of certain loss. --Alix Wilber

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