A Farewell To Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
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Book Reviews of A Farewell To Arms
Book Review: well...
Summary: 5 Stars
Ok folks. I had no intention of writing a review of A Farewell To Arms, but what's been written on this page necessitates a response. This is not an anti-war novel. Well, I suppose it's anti-war in the sense that there is a war and wars are bad. There is no definitive literary content in this novel that suggests that Hemingway was making an anti-war statement. In FACT, the only work that Hemingway unequivocally dubbed "anti-war" was For Whom The Bell Tolls. There really are only two grotesque war scenes (the shell exploding in the drivers' tent and the man bleeding to death in the ambulance) and that hardly constitutes the book's classification as an "anti-war novel" or "anti-war allegory" or parable or masterwork or whatever you want to insert to justify yourself. Sure, one cane make the assertion that the man bleeding to death in the ambulance was indicitive of the slow, callous slaughter of the world's young healthy males during WWI, but it would have been impossible for Hemingway to have written the entire book without making SOME reference to the grotesque nature of the war. A Farewell To Arms, however, is not Guernica. It is not a Dadaist painting. It is certainly not that old Mel Gibson movie where he dies at the end (remember that?).
The point is, this book has thematic elements that hardly relate to war. Take love, for instance. But love, unto itself, is more a compication than anything. At it's simplest, the novel is about strength. Strength, unabashed and unflinching. It is about the eternal struggle that every strong man and woman fights until their (untimely) death. It is the struggle with the world and the universe, which so callously torments the strong until they succumb to the weight of the unforgiving cosmos.
The most fallacious aspect of calling A Farewell To Arms a "war novel" is really the fact that it undermines what Hemingway wanted the reader to take away from the book: the fact that war is simply one of many trials and tribulations that slowly and painfully break us. It is yet another painful step towards death, which is, according to Hemingway, the definition of finality. It is in death that we all end and that the trials finally cease.
Now, in terms of what's been written on this page, I have very little to say. A Farewell To Arms, whether you care to admit it or not, transcends anything and everything written on Amazon.com or any other site that presents the book simply as a commodity and a merchandisable memento from a writer whose image has been bastardized by a lack of public understanding. Catherine, for her part, is a pristine character: she is unquestionably strong and her jubilance ("cheesiness") is a reflection of her unflinching loyalty to Henry. What people often fail to realize is that Henry is not really the "man" of A Farewell To Arm. Catherine fills the role that, in any other Hemingway novel, would be filled by a man. She is not simply a sad, helpless woman whose death is an unfortunate occurance in Henry's life. She is a bastion of stength and earthly defiance.
Now, Clearly this novel is not for everyone. However, insulting it because of it's "simple language" or lack of action or simply it's supposedly stilted dialogue or whatever else you care to come up with is positively absurd. Hemingway's style was not simply an iconoclastic stab at trying to make something new and weird. It reflected the focused effort that Hemingway made throughout his life to defy the established literary community by rejecting the overwrought floweriness of past novels. This act of defiance and rejection, however, was not important unto itself. If a man simply writes a story using basic verbiage, he has accomplished nothing. Hemingway did more. A Farewell To Arms is but a primer- the basic, pure outline of a massive concept that governed Hemingway's life. The book's significance lies in implication and subtleties. Hemingway often likened his novels to icebergs, in that they were primarily obscured. It is unfortunate that so few modern Hemingway readers are willing to penetrate that obscured mass that lies beneath A Farewell To Arms.
It is beneath the immediate novel that one finds the truth: The inevitable approach of death. The inherent cruelty of God. The unfortunate way of the strong. The beauty that lies only in our interactions with the ones we know and love. This is not an action story. This is not some trite Chicken Soup garbage feigning truth and meaning.
And on that note, don't get me started on Chicken Soup For The Soul. I thank God for books like A Farewell To Arms, which exist in polar opposition to all the self-help garbage that is being vomited up by modern, brain-dead "writers". The more self-help books a person reads, the more he becomes senseless and blind. He becomes filled with a trite, meaningless happiness derived from stupid falsitudes. The first step in understanding truth is abandoning the rediculous contrivances contained in modern self-help literature, which exist only to shelter us from life's uncomfortable truths. A Farewell To Arms might be "depressing", but it is at the very least candid. It is real, and it has a depth that surpasses that of most modern literature. If you don't like it, go pick up your Dan Brown novel and be thankful everyone is happy at the end. Philistines.
Book Review: Great Novel Of Love and War
Summary: 5 Stars
A Farewell to Arms, written by Ernest Hemingway, classically combines love, misery, seduction, and sorrow all in one historic novel. This wonderful novel depicts the harsh realities of war among two lovers entangled in the mist. The main character, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, and his lover, Nurse Catherine Barkley, initially have a relationship consisting of games, illusions, and fantasies. This cleverly ties in with the war that currently encompasses Henry, World War I. The blending of these aspects results in one of Hemingway's greatest novels.Lieutenant Henry lives his daily life as an ambulance driver for the army. Disillusioned by the war, he meets an English nurse, Barkley, who mourns for her dead fiancé. They commence a game of seduction, each with their own reasons for playing it. Barkley, psychologically damaged from the death of her fiancé, struggles to push the history behind her while Henry tries to stay as far away from the war as possible. After a little while together, Barkley brings up the game they play by saying, "This is rotten game we play, isn't it" (31)? Henry retorts that he "treated seeing Catherine very lightly" (41).
Embodying the stereotype of the testosterone-fed male, Henry also looks for sex from Miss Barkley. He yearns for pleasure in a world filled with despair and death. As the novel progresses, his accounts of the war decline in quality and quantity. Accounts of the war decrease and become less detailed, showing that he continually bothers less with the war. Henry changes from a man living with the war to a man only interested in himself and anything directly related, including Catherine Barkley.
The relationship between the two lovers changes as time passes by as well. Their relationship progresses from an illusion to actual feelings of love. "We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together" (249). Apparently Henry believed love existed when two people felt as they did together. It indirectly affects the war for Henry because as the relationship consumes more of his life, his unwilling grip to war weakens. The importance of it decreases as Barkley's significance increases to him. As time goes on, Henry turns into a man who prioritizes a greater love for Catherine. He throws away his integrity and runs from the army, showing the shifts in his list of priorities. War only existed as something in his way.
This anti-war novel clearly convinces all about the unsympathetic truths of World War I or, more simply, war in general. "The West front did not sound so good...I did not see how it could go on" (118). Throughout the course of the novel, Henry faces the deaths of many of his companions. Upon realizing his love, Catherine Barkley, now must stand at the brink of death, Lieutenant Henry grimly accepts the truth. "They killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you" (327). In all his days in the war, he never realizes the death surrounding him until the person he cares for most begins to slip from his grasp.
Hemingway, in his novel, teaches others the psychological features of people, interweaving it with the innuendos of the darkness of war so readers cannot forget the environment and setting that the two main characters feel trapped in. He gives others a refreshing breath from society by denouncing materialism. The idea of denouncing materialism ideally fits in psychologically with the ongoing war. He urges others to reconsider their materialistic priorities for something more genuine. Hemingway never made these materialistic possessions important. Nature, one of the things he embraced, clearly shows its importance when he felt it necessary to write, "The first cool nights came, then the days were cool and the leaves on the trees in the park began to turn color" (133). He felt it necessary to describe the colored canvas produced by the changing of the surrounding trees as autumn came.
As Richard Schickel once said, "A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them." Throughout the novel, Hemingway remains constant in keeping up the realistic atmosphere he introduces in the beginning and how it affects Henry's life. This romantic literature never ceases to be unfair to the readers' high expectations of works by Ernest Hemingway. As a highly popular and recommended novel, it lives up to the just raves. Pick up a copy of this thoughtful, beautifully written novel. Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to Hemingway, but very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition," a somewhat raw, but oddly engaging little novel I can't stop thinking about.
Book Review: Terse is the new boring
Summary: 3 Stars
This New Years, I only made one resolution: to read at least 25 books by my 25th birthday (October 24, 2005) and fifty books by the end of 2005. After finishing Last Exit to Brooklyn for book four, I was at a bit of a loss on what to read. David was still reading Ulysses, and there weren't any books on the list really calling me to read them. Then, I awoke one morning two weeks ago to find that one of my favourite living authors was no longer living. Hunter S. Thompson was a fan of Hemingway, and rumour had it that he actually typed out an entire Hemingway novel when he was younger in order to learn the style. Hemingway was considered one of Dr. Thompson's inspirations, and if it's good enough for Hunter, it's good enough for me.
There are many things I could say about Farewell to Arms, and I'm not sure where to begin. Don't waste your time might be one. There are about 70 pages of good text dispersed throughout the 250+ pages of texts, the remainder being filler material to illustrate a really annoying and demented love story and a rather boring war. Lt. Henry runs about as a World War I ambulance driver, eventually becoming wounded and deserting the army due to the horrors of war-horrors that don't show up until you're about 70 pages from the end of the book, mind you. The rest of his war time is spent getting drunk and laid, but not in a very interesting or exciting way.
Critics have called the style terse. I call it boring.
His love interest, Catherine, is about as annoying as females in a male-centric world get. She's a blonde air-headed nurse whose idealised ideas and strange, light, flowery dialogue borders on psychotic at points. Later, Hemingway tries to defend his heroine by having her say that she was "a bit crazy" when she met Henry-the understatement of the year.
Predictable is another word that springs to mind. Maybe it is because Hemingway has become such a standard in literature copied by so many writers that what was once fresh and new has become dated and cliche, but I really cannot imagine the ending of the book ever was anything but predictable. It's one of my main criticisms of Hemingway, from the first piece I ever read by him (the short story "Hills Like White Elephants") to this novel. Not only is his prose sparse and utilitarian for no apparent reason other than defining a style for himself, but there is no forward momentum to keep my interest piqued. Usually, I can read a book of 250 pages in a week or less. This book took me three weeks because it simply wasn't a pressing concern. Reading Last Exit or Norwegian Wood for this 50 books project, I was constantly compelled to read, sometimes sacrificing meals and sleep to read because I wanted to know what happened. Who lived? Who died. There's really no way to empathise with Hemingway's characters, and it is in this way that the book falls short.
Detachment is another applicable word. Everything is detached. As an American fighting in the Italian army, Lt. Henry is not attached to the war, which his country has not entered yet, nor is he attached to the troops he fights with. He develops what I can only call a superficial love with Catherine, for no matter how much he professes his dear, undying love for his girlfriend, it never feels genuine. It all seems to be a show, part of an elaborate farce that Hemingway is putting on for himself.
There were times when I wanted to just call it quits, to throw in the towel and say I simply couldn't do it. I couldn't go on. I cried over this book, not because I was so emotionally involved in the story, but because each page I turned was physically painful to me because the story was not rewarding my efforts as a reader. I felt stupid. How could I, an English Literature student who has been reading since before she was two years old not finish Hemingway? It's a classic. What kind of idiot was I? What was wrong with me?
Then I realised there was nothing wrong with me-it was the book that was the problem.
If there is any reason to finish the book, you'll find those reasons from page 192-193, between 210-215, and on the last page of the book. These are the places where Hemingway's style really comes through and you can see his influence on writers such as Thompson. Otherwise, there are much better anti-war novels out there which are much more accessible. I definitely recommend Slaughterhouse-Five instead of this novel. If you're interested specifically in anti-war literature surrounding the first World War, might I suggest the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen. Either of those will show you that war is hell, and with more emotion and urgency than Hemingway could ever muster about even the most powerful of subjects.
Book Review: Love Is A Battlefield
Summary: 4 Stars
Is "A Farewell To Arms" an anti-war novel? I say no.
Like others note, there's not a lot of actual violence here. The protagonist, Lt. Henry, is nearly killed while eating cheese, and has to spend much time in a hospital where his convalescence is something akin to Club Med. He doesn't have to be in this war, as he is an American and his country at this point in World War I (early 1917) is still neutral. When one doctor tells him his knee requires time to heal before it can be operated on, Henry says no, do it now. He wants to go back to the front.
Later, his mind changes, when the Italian Army finds itself in headlong retreat and the bloody "Battle Police" start shooting officers. Yes, bad things happen to him, and his lover Catherine, by book's end, and Henry's powerful narration offers sentiments like this: "I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory, and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done to the meat except to bury it."
But the worst thing that happens in this book happens not in war-torn northern Italy but peaceful Switzerland. My sense is that Hemingway thought of war as another one of those things men do, no more a cause for censure than driving without a safety belt. He didn't glorify it, but he doesn't seem to bemoan it, either. It's an adventure like any other, with its necessary share of perils.
I think the power of this book comes not from its depiction of war but of life and love. The war zone where Lt. Henry and Catherine plight their troth is a metaphor for life lived under any circumstance of pressure. Love is the great killer, not war, because it gives people real value and thus elicits real sorrow from their demise. When Henry has his final epiphany, and talks about how "they killed you in the end," he's talking about the unseen masters of human fate, for whom saving or not saving souls in peril is akin to watching ants burning on a log.
Hemingway's religious views here are most interesting; he's quite nearly an atheist here, but not exactly. His protagonist seems unwilling to entirely let go, seeking the counsel of a priest and telling an old man he will pray for him. Of course, he's also boozing it up, living in sin, and pretty dismissive of religious values as a whole, but it's not a dead issue, and his discussions on the subject are engagingly bipartisan.
There's greatness throughout this book. The opening, where Lt. Henry wiles away the winter lull in combat with his agreeably eccentric companion Rinaldi, pulls you in with its swift, alkaline portrait of camions and kings rolling across muddy roads to the front. The ending is great, too, and I very much like Henry's stay in the hospital; Hemingway at his most romantic, comic, and even hopeful.
People have problems with Catherine being Henry's boy toy, and it's true she becomes more docile as the story goes on. But its because she represents an ideal, a hope for human happiness based on a real-life nurse whom Hemingway had a brief, unsatisfying, but haunting encounter with. She's utter male fantasy; even when she tells Henry to "shut up," he notes she says it "as though you didn't want to offend anyone." (She agrees.) But she is the means by which the book creates real human involvement.
Alas, not complete involvement. I know Hemingway's a great writer, better than I'll ever be (and I'm trying), but he leaves me cold at times in this book, as he samples the various wines and discourses at length about various things in that clean, terse way that excites admiration but repulses identification. There are pages and pages devoted to things like horse races and cafe idylls that just go nowhere, and my tired eyes scan over the tight sentences like so much gravel in a stream bed.
Another reviewer here says "A Farewell To Arms" is a novel with great moments, but isn't great. I agree. It's tremendously readable, and parts of it are worth memorizing, but overall, the effect is less for me than "The Sun Also Rises," "The Old Man And The Sea," and Papa's many great short stories. It's a solid book worth reading, but not his greatest work.
Book Review: Farewell to Arms: A book review by Jacky Jones
Summary: 3 Stars
It is World War I. the fighting between the allied and enemy forces throughout Europe has worn on for months. Almost everyone is tired of the fighting but continue to serve for the good of their countries. For an American serving in the Italian Army, who lacks the patriotism for the country he serves, it becomes quite difficult to focus on the importance of the cause at hand. The discovery of love by Fredrico Henry proves to be a major distraction that ultimately affects the remainder of his presence (or lack of presence) in the war and his subsequent lifestyle. Ernest Hemingway left A Farewell to Arms, although with many sub-themes, with a focus on the classic theme of love and war. The focus on these two themes is evident in the way the two affect each other and in the organization that Hemingway used in the novel. Because the main character narrates the story himself the reader has a keen insight on his true feelings on both love and war. We find in the beginning of the novel that Henry has no incredibly strong viewpoint on the war itself, he seems not to like or dislike it. It is not until the presence of a person who creates love and passion in his life that a true standpoint begins to form. It is the desire to return to love that gives him the inspiration to break from his present situation later in the story. The other major character that could be considered more static, as compared to the dynamic nature of Henry's character, is Catherine. With her love and dedication she produces the inspiration in Henry that creates the changes in his character. The presence of the conflict of war in the novel is used to show the changes that it too can have directly or indirectly on a person's outlook on life. The novel is organized in a manner that seems to separate the effects of love on a life and the effects of war on that same person. The primary chapters of the book deal with the terrible images and injuries that Henry encounters during the fighting. Hemingway does an excellent job at painting a picture of the horrifying aspects of war during a specific battle scene early in the story. He also does a great job in later parts of the story at relaying the way that Henry and Catherine feel about each other. He does this with detailed inner monologues on the part of Henry, and complex but easy to understand dialogues between the two lovers. At the very beginning the novel is somewhat hard to get into because the narration starts by trying to pull the reader into an event (the war) that has already started. There is though some action that pulls you quickly into the plot, and is then followed by the basis of Henry and Catherine's romance. The book is organized in to chapters within books one through five. This separation of parts of the book, and the flow of the writing proves to make A Farewell to Arms an easy reader. One difficulty that a reader may encounter while experiencing this reading may be the complex dialogues. Sometimes the dialogues carry on for so long that it becomes hard to keep track of who is talking at what time. At times it may be necessary to go and read back through the text to understand exactly who is speaking in order to retain its significance. The plot overall is not hard to understand or hard to follow and creates a quite rewarding experience in the end. While reading this book it became quite easy to get close to the characters. Characterization is utilized well by Hemmingway to achieve this true knowledge of both Henry, and Catherine at times. The message of the book can be looked at as one that stresses the importance of love in trying times of chaos. This novel also gives an insight to the softer sides of the war. Although brutal at times, it gives outlooks into the slower and less action pact parts of fighting that are not often seen in a war novel, such as time spent with other soldiers in the mess hall, strong friendships, time in the hospital and the bliss of residing in a country neutral to the war.