In preparation for a computer upgrade, I've been doing some digital housekeeping, mostly deleting duplicate files. Usually it's just a matter of SELECT-ALL and DELETE, but alas, for some reason this doesn't work with zipped files, so they have to be done one-by-one which is slow and annoying and very, very boring. Which is why I've procrastinated, of course, and didn't do it last time I had an upgrade. Listening to an audio book of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms has helped to while away the time.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is listed in 1001 Books for

• The Sun Also Rises (1926), see my thoughts here


• A Farewell to Arms (1929)


• To Have and Have Not (1937)


• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), see my thoughts here


• The Old Man and the Sea (1952, read ages ago pre-blog)

(I've also reviewed 'Out of Season' (1923), a short story which is said to mark a turning point in his writing.

Now, I know it's fashionable to deride Hemingway because he's 'a dead white male' and is guilty of flaws typical of his generation. Critics of A Farewell to Arms also like to snipe that the realism of his war scenes are not authentic because (as 1001 Books somewhat pompously says) the novelist's combat experience was more limited than that of his protagonist. But so what? He is a marvellous writer. My favourite is For Whom the Bell Tolls, but A Farewell to Arms is very good too.

There is a brief moment when the Italians are retreating that exemplifies Hemingway's terse depiction of the brutality of war, drawing our attention to something we might not have understood about the exigencies of warfare.

Frederic is seeking instructions for what to do with the wounded.

'The orders are that we stay here. You clear the wounded from here to the clearing station.'

'Sometimes we clear from the clearing station to the field hospitals too,' I said. 'Tell me, I have never seen a retreat—if there is a retreat how are all the wounded evacuated?'

'They are not. They take as many as they can and leave the rest.'

'What will I take in the cars?'

'Hospital equipment.' (p.187 of my print edition, Scriber 2003.)

We all know that WW1 was a slaughterhouse, but I was not aware that wounded men were left behind at the mercy of the advancing Germans. All those bereaved wives and mothers who were told that their men 'died immediately and would not have felt a thing' must have recoiled in horror when they read that scene.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/08/31/a-farewell-to-arms-1929-by-ernest-hemingway-... ( )

This book affected me so much more than I though it would. Hemingway's writing style just really worked for me here. After I finished it I just sat silently, staring and processing and I carried those emotions for several days. ( )

“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) ( )

A somewhat meandering tale of young American ambulance driver who for some reason joined the Italian army and was engaged in the Austrian/Italian battle lines of northeast Italy. It seems almost shallow but then has an absolute brute of an ending. ( )

In general, Hemingway is a favorite author of mine. He doesn't mince words. Never too many words. He paints clear pictures as he writes and I like that. He does this in A Farewell to Arms, but in a manner that I found repetitious and long-winded. The dialogue is stinted and, IMHO, silly. It had been forty years since I last read this book and quite honestly was excited to read it again. Rereading a book after so long is often very close to reading it again. I was disappointed. I think because I didn't truly know what I was reading.
The description of the WWI battles in Italy towards the end of the war (1917) were very good. His description of what the men were going through, what their lives were like, is wonderfully put but the dialogue is what bogs it down. I began to simply scan over the dialogue as it was the descriptive pieces that were enjoyable- if describing the rough life of those on the front line assisting the wounded could be called wonderful!
Of course, this book, at is core, is about the love between Henry and Catherine, which to me seemed a bit forced at first. Again it was the dialogue between them that I found unrealistic, there was no depth between these two characters. It actually wasn't until the last third of the book that I began to believe in their love for one another. It was their stay in Switzerland, towards the end of the. book that I noted a tenderness that he had for her. And it literally wasn't until the last two or three pages that I even realized why he wrote the story the way he did. Perhaps if I had fully realized the type of memoire this book was/is, I would have enjoyed it more. The ending was tragic but it is the last paragraph that caused me to understand the book.
Even at that, though, I feel it is not his best work- even though I know it was a huge international success at the time. It is not a book I will recommend unless I am able to tell a bit of why I believe it was written in the way it was.
It is a memoire of a man during about 2 years of his life at the end of WWI who is writing in a stream of consciousness not just an event that redefined him as a person, but the events leading up to that point in his life. ( )