A Farewell To Arms

Many years ago, I put down the story after reading about 30 pages or so. But this time round, I force myself to read it again and what a pleasant chance of attitude towards it. What does war mean to a young man? To the protagonist Mr Henry, who serves as an ambulance driver in the Italian territory. It is unsound and unreasonable. He first gets wounded in the knee, gets himself treated and risks his life by going back to the front. When the army is in retreat, he almost gets himself shoot by high-rank officers, who do not reason nor do they care how many soldiers they have to shoot to kill. Mr Henry decides to run away from such madness by jumping into a nearby stream and gets drifted away from the retreating army. With a floating log, he survives bad luck and comes back to visit his girl, Catherine. With the help of a barman, the young couple run away and seek refuge in Switzerland. The story concludes with the death of Catherine who dies of hemorrhage in hospital. The story is written in the first person, with a linear storyline. Unlike For Whom the Bell Tolls, this is not punctuated with artistic effect which calls attention to the text itself; rather it has a smoothness that appeals to readers both contemporary and nowadays. Though the delivery of my book is late for 5 works days, I am able to finish reading it in 2018, the 100th anniversary of the victorious ending of World War One, during which the fictionalized story took place and in which the author drew his experience. Deeply touching!

Rules become more demanding in times of trouble. There is a clearer and more unforgiving sense of good guys and bad guys, right and wrong. Ironically, however, times of trouble can also see civilised rules of behaviour torn apart. A Farewell to Arms tells a story set in World War One. An American named Frederick Henry joins the Italian army as an ambulance driver. Caught in a chaotic retreat, he witnesses summary and arbitrary justice meted out by military policemen. Realising his own side is as lethal as the enemy, Henry deserts. The story then follows Henry through his desperate escape bid. The writing of Henry’s story mirrors the breaking of rules in his life. As a narrator, Frederick Henry ignores all the civilised writing rules drummed into the aspiring author - repeated words, frequent adverbs, passive voice, limited vocabulary, confusing sentences, liberal use of intensifiers such as “very”, which intensify weak adjectives such as “nice”. And yet the rules of good writing lurk, the demanding sense that these words are shaped. This “bad” writing aspires to excellence. In the famous opening paragraph, Hemingway uses repeated words like “the” to give rhythm, as in a spoken conversation. The use of “the” also serves to conduct us into Henry’s world, where mountains he describes are “the” mountains which narrator and reader both seem to be looking at, rather than any old range of hills introduced to us at the beginning of a story. From then on every untutored line has a hidden quality. Take, for example, the following exchange: “I went everywhere. Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Villa San Giovanni, Messina, Taormina——” “You talk like a time-table. Did you have any beautiful adventures?” “Yes.” “Where?” “Milano, Firenze, Roma, Napoli——” A timetable might not seem like great writing, but there is undeniable beauty in simple place names. Place names, for example, are hugely influential in song writing, the music journalist Nick Coleman suggesting that apart from love, “pop is better on cities than anything else.” The writing of A Farewell to Arms might have the literary quality of a timetable, but that doesn’t mean it can’t aspire to the sort of poetry informing thousands of songs. A Farewell to Arms is a perfect combination of form and content, of what is said and how it is said. As in James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, A Farewell to Arms is a remarkable writing achievement in the form of not very good writing

It's interesting to me how fictional books written with the backdrop of World War 1 differ so greatly with those written with the backdrop of World War 2. The WW2 books almost universally focus on the struggle of good versus evil: the heroics of the Allies, and the despicable nature of the Nazis and those who supported them. A WW2 Ally soldier had no reason to wonder why he was fighting, and what the objective was. Afterwards, the soldier need only look at the Holocaust to know that he did right to kill his enemies on the battlefield, and that the loss of so many fellow soldiers was part of a noble effort. ("Gee, I wonder if it was wrong to shoot that Nazi," would probably never be a line in any novel). Not so with WW1. In that war, it seems that no one was quite clear why they were fighting or what, exactly, the objectives were. Like any war, it was kill or be killed, but for what purpose exactly? (The same can be said from the point of view of the American soldier in the later part of the Vietnam War). In "A Farewell to Arms," Hemingway sucessfully captures the futility and madness of the War, and the absolute insanity that people fighting in it were driven to. Since the two main characters are an ambulance driver and a nurse, we see the horrible injuries and deaths suffered by soldiers on the battlefield, and get a good introduction to the wartime practice of medicine in the early 20th Century. Hemingway drove an ambulance during WW1 himself, and clearly knows his stuff. Don't ask me how, but "Farewell" is the first Hemingway book I've ever read. For some strange reason, I managed to avoid his work through High School (I recall that I perhaps was supposed to read "The Old Man of the Sea," but I either forgot it entirely, or read the Cliff notes). I have to say that I certainly enjoyed "Farewell," and plan to read more Hemingway in the future, but I struggled, at first, to get used to the writing. In the first 100 pages or so, I found the terseness and simplicity of the sentences to be a distraction, and wondered if, perhaps, the author was vastly over-rated. I also found the dialogue stiff and, on occasion, down-right bizarre. For instance, often the characters (especially Fred Henry) would respond to each other with a flat sounding "all right," which I thought didn't flow at all. But after awhile, the Hemingway style started to make an impression on me and I appreciated it, not only in the war scenes, but also concerning the romance between Fred and Catherine, which, although incredibly corny at times, worked for me. You could see the tragedy at the end a few chapters away (the blissful moments in rural Switzerland simply could not last), but it effected me even so. Frankly, I still prefer authors who use more complex sentence structure, but, as I kept reading this book, I grew more appreciative of wha...

Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms takes place during World War I and relates the experience of the war through the first-person account of an American serving in the Italian Army. The narrator is an ambulance driver, holds the rank of lieutenant, and supervises a small squad of fellow paramedics serving on the Italian front. This is all revealed slowly over the course of the book, and it isn’t until about halfway through that we learn his name is Frederic Henry. Early in the book, Henry is wounded and spends time in a hospital in Milan, where he meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. A Farewell to Arms is the first novel I’ve read by Hemingway, although I have read some of his short stories. I generally prefer older books of naturalist and romanticist literature, and I was worried he might be too modern for my tastes. To my pleasant surprise, Hemingway uses modernist techniques like stream of consciousness sparingly, only in the most emotionally tense moments, when it is most appropriate. A Farewell to Arms is quite modernist, however, in another respect: its deliberate avoidance of drama. It is almost as if Hemingway goes out of his way to deprive his audience of any satisfying dramatic moments, as if to deliver a thrill or a tear would be a cliché. The narrator relates the most frightening and stressful moments of life like war, birth, and death with a delivery so deadpan he could be reading the phone book. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened—in feelingless monotone. I don’t require a war novel to contain combat scenes, but there ought to be some moments of emotional power that illustrate the effect that war has on human lives, instead of just a series of meals and pointless conversations. At one point, a person is shot and killed (not by the enemy) and the event is merely glossed over in a sentence or two as if nothing ever happened. That should have been a shocking moment in the character’s development, but to shock would be too conventional, so instead it is treated as a commonplace occurrence. This deliberate eschewing of emotional stimulation is most evident in Henry’s romance with Barkley. They have sex, drink wine, and engage in terrible dialogue which makes her sound stupid. Henry repeatedly says he loves her, but it is difficult for the reader to see why, other than she’s beautiful and available. It is not easy to care for such a thinly drawn character, which makes any scene in which the two are in danger that much more difficult to become emotionally invested in. All bets are off in the final chapter, however, which is far more visceral and moving than the book that precedes it, even though it has nothing to do with the war. Though the outcome is predictable, Henry’s reaction to it is the best writing in the book. If the entire novel were as good as its final chapter, its statu...

Written in a clean, eloquent voice, this book is a long chew, but worth it. Beautiful and jagged. The faint of heart need not apply.