A Farewell To Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ernest HemingwayEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1995-06-01
ISBN: 0684801469
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Scribner
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Book Reviews of A Farewell To Arms
Book Review: one of the awful-lest books...
Summary: 1 Stars
I will put a qualifier up front on this review - I listened to this book on tape. I think the reader's expression of dialogue particularly just exacerbated my annoyance with this book. I originally tried to read it, but I found the run-on sentences nearly impossible to endure.
I really wanted to understand the value and meaning of this book as others have clearly found, but I could not... I found the characters shallow, Baby. I don't know why Catherine and Frederic fell in love.
The dialogue was ridiculous, Darling. It was neither grand nor spendid. The speech patterns, using the same words over and over (p. 134, "We were all cooked... cooked...cooked........"), and also Catherine consistently flip-flopping (me paraphrasing and exaggerating... I hate the rain. It scares me. I love it.) made me want to bang my head against the wall.
As I said, I wanted to "get" this book and appreciate Hemingway, but I came away thinking he wasn't a very good writer and this wasn't even a very good book.
Summary of A Farewell To Arms
The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- is one of the greatest moments in literary history. A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was 30 years old, represents a new romanticism for Hemingway.As a youth of 18, Ernest Hemingway was eager to fight in the Great War. Poor vision kept him out of the army, so he joined the ambulance corps instead and was sent to France. Then he transferred to Italy where he became the first American wounded in that country during World War I. Hemingway came out of the European battlefields with a medal for valor and a wealth of experience that he would, 10 years later, spin into literary gold with A Farewell to Arms. This is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two meet in Italy, and almost immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous nature of love in a time of war. During their first encounter, Catherine tells Henry about her fianc? of eight years who had been killed the year before in the Somme. Explaining why she hadn't married him, she says she was afraid marriage would be bad for him, then admits:
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.The two begin an affair, with Henry quite convinced that he "did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards." Soon enough, however, the game turns serious for both of them and ultimately Henry ends up deserting to be with Catherine.
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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