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Farewell To Arms (Paperback)
by Farewell To Arms
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A realistic depiction of war's carnage and confusion, a compelling adventure, and a beautiful war-time romance. |
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Author: Farewell To Arms
Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition
Pub. in: June, 1995
ISBN: 0684801469
Pages: 336
Measurements: 8.0 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00456
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- MSL Picks -
A Farewell to Arms is a tragic story by Ernest Hemingway, a first person view of an American fighting for the Italian Army against the German empire in the climax of WWI. Frederic Henry is an ambulance driver, a job Hemingway experienced first hand during his time in WWI, giving the reader an epic and historically accurate story of love and war. He meets and immediately falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a beautiful English woman. In a tragic turn of events, Henry falls victim to serious leg injuries as a result of a mortar rocket accident. He is soon moved to the same hospital that Catherine is working as a nurse at, and their relationship blossoms.
Hemingway's ability to write compelling and emotional novels using only the most basic prose is something alone to seek after in his writing. His descriptions are short and quick, and the way the words read themselves off the page draw up a lot of emotion. The simplicity and authenticity in his writing are what make this story so completely immersive and depressing: the way you can feel the character of Henry himself decaying as his mental state of sanity runs along the edge of loosing it, and you can really relate to the way he feels at the end of the story. He is wound so tight and his life has been affected so greatly by the war that you can't help but feel his struggle.
A Farewell to Arms excels not only in Hemingway's ability to describe emotions, but in his historically accurate description of what WWI did to Europe, and what it did to the individuals directly affected by it's reign of destruction. Hemingway gave us a completely immersed first-person view on the complete details of the war, right down to the emptiness and surreal tragedy of death. The fact of it is, there was not anyone in Europe that was left unaffected by the war, and whether or not we ran from it we would fall victim. Hemingway gave us an insight to the way wars worked, and the way they will spread like a virus; leaving everything it touches to decay and slowly fade away.
"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. 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 special hurry"
To Hemingway, the war was just a tool for the world, and how it breaks you into who you need to be. Those that were kind or exceptionally brave and unbreakable, those who could not give up their soul, were killed. In A Farewell to Arms, Henry tries to resist being broken, and witnesses those around him dying and all the evil of the world. Not even he himself can avoid breaking at one point or another, and as Hemmingway so clearly put it, we will always come to an end at some point or another. In fact, Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the face with a shotgun one afternoon, even though he has repeatedly spoken of suicide in his writing as wrong.
Overall, Hemingway's ability to reflect on the individual part of a larger evil brings the book to our level. Other writers talk about distant conceptions or write about the idea of war as a whole, which Hemingway does reflect on as well. However, he expands on this, and centers in on the personal effects of such a horrific war. The numbness Henry eventually reaches is tragic, and the way he is eventually broken to just give in and not care is additionally depressing. The way Hemingway ends the book would have had less of an impact had Henry cried or grieved, but the way Henry can't even fathom the amount of grief he is left to deal with, and the way Henry represses his emotions and simply keeps on living is what gives the reader such a powerful impact.
(From Chris, USA)
Target readers:
General readers
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Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the expatriate writers of Paris along with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gettrude Stein, and others. He fought in the Spanish Civil War and wrote A Farewell to Arms and other stories on war and its unseen costs, including For Whom the Bell Tolls. Other titles by Hemingway include A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises.
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From the Publisher:
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.
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Chapter One
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.
Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.
There were small gray motor cars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly.
At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.
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Leslie Lanier (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
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 fiance. They commence a game of seduction, each with their own reasons for playing it. Barkley, psychologically damaged from the death of her fiance, 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 has 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.
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Beth Barton (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Frederick Henry is an American enlisted with the Italians as an ambulance driver on the front lines when he meets Scottish born Catherine Barkley working in the hospital where he is stationed. Their love story juxtaposed against the deprecations of war and the injustices of life goes a long way towards explaining Hemingway himself. How could a man hold up under these kinds of circumstances?
could never get into The Old man and the Sea ... both times I got to page 15 and was distracted away from it. Imagine my surprise when, after only about half an hour I had read 78 pages of Farewell to Arms. This is an easy, fast paced book to read and I have really come to appreciate his writing style. More than that, I have come to appreciate the dark cloud that I have always seemed to associate with him.
Classic Hemingway: "That is what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or killed you gratuitously..."
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Schwartz (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
I love Ernest Hemingway's writing, and have read a number of his books. This is probably one of the books that he is most well-known for. The story is set on the Italian front of World War I, and it tells the story of two star-crossed lovers. Hemingway's themes for each of his books are so realistic because he experienced a lot of the things he wrote about himself. That's what makes his books so wonderful. Hemingway did not have a good opinion of war, and these thoughts come through loud and clear in this book. The story is about Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American who has volunteered to serve with an Italian ambulance unit during World War I. Catherine Barkley is the nurse whom Frederic nicknames "Cat", and who he falls in love with. Hemingway's other characters are all equally well-drawn. His plot and his description of scenes is also wonderful Hemingway uses his descriptions of place as allegories to human well-being and luck. Hemingway associates the plains and rains with death, disease and sorrow, and the mountains and the snow with life, health and happiness. His two lovers experience happiness and safety in the mountains, but they cannot stay there indefinitely, so when they go back to the plains, bad things happen to them. A Farewell to Arms appears to be a bleak tale, but it delineates probably more than any other of Hemingway's works his fatalistic attitude to life and death. Hemingway is a wonderful author, and his works are well worth reading. |
Keith Stuckeman (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Growing up I heard many people talk about Enerst Hemmingway being one of the great authors of our time. After reading Farewell to Arms and many other I truly believe he is. In the novel the main characters life follows closely that of Hemmingways life. The main character is Lieutenant Frederic Henrey who is an American ambulence driver for the Italian Army in World War I. It begins in the late summer before winter comes, so battles are winding down. He goes out in tours Italy until Spring arrives and he comes back to the front of the war. He then meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse who is the love interest of his friend Rinaldi. Though Rinaldi fades out of the picture as the story goes on and an intriguing game of seduction forms between Henrey and Catherine. This started to show the conflict of love during time of war. To add gas to the fire Hemmingway tells that Catherine had a fiance who died the year before in the war. Catherine is confused and longs to feel love again even if she just has to pretend, but the war has left Henry cold and detached that he'll settle for anything. Over time the love becomes real and conquers all in this tale. There are not many bright points throughout this novel, but that’s how some people few life as being. That’s not to mention the tragic ending, which I found typical for most of Hemmingways writings. That was just negative I guess you can say besides not relating to any one character. It gives a great depicition of man's will and courage under pressure countless ways, while facing so much loss at such a little cost. Nevertheless, I see it as being a token of respect to the value of human life and love throughout the world. |
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