A Farewell to Arms [Paperback]

Ernest Hemingway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1969

Published by the Charles Scribner's Sons New York

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons; First edition (1969)
• ASIN: B000E0P56K
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #765,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 3 1/2 Stars - Gritty wartime narrative and emotionally manipulative love story, November 30, 2011

By 

Bryan Byrd (Earth) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Farewell to Arms (Paperback)

*** This review contains spoilers ***

'A Farewell to Arms' is the story of the American Frederic Henry, who serves in the Ambulance Corps of the Italian Army during WWI. There he meets and falls in love with an English nurse named Catherine Barclay, and after a disastrous retreat by the Italians where Lt. Henry is implicated as a traitor, he and Catherine escape to Switzerland. Catherine, now pregnant, and Frederic spend an idyllic winter waiting out the war and for their child to be born. Tragically, neither mother nor child survive the birth, and the book ends forlornly, with Frederic walking away from the hospital in the rain.

I do not generally post reviews with such blatant spoilers, though I feel some responsibility alleviated due to the overall awareness of Hemingway's book in our literary culture, or from the films based on it. Even still, I myself didn't know of the particulars of the plot before reading, though I could fairly well guess Catherine's fate based on the melancholy tone of the novel from beginning to end. The difficulty as a reviewer is that my evaluation of the book rests solely on my estimation of the end, and to justify the middling rating, I felt it necessary to specifically outline why the ending is so unsatisfactory.

First though, the positives - which are still somewhat relative.

Even from a distance of more than eighty years, I can see how this book could have been very fresh when it was published. Hemingway's terse descriptions and pitter-patter dialog must have stunned readers used to floral-arrangement countrysides and refined voices. I think one of the strengths of the book is the Spartan settings, though the conversational pieces sound almost nonsensical to my modern ears. Another strength is its gritty-though-still-restrained realism, both in the descriptions of the war and in the adult situations between Frederic and Catherine. This is, of course, a relative assumption - in comparison to what we have now, 'A Farewell to Arms' is still quite tame and euphemistic; its most shocking moment coming during the retreat as Lt. Henry must deal with insubordinate soldiers.

A short blurb from Wikipedia says the book "skillfully contrasts the meaning of personal tragedy against... impersonal destruction". My objection is that Hemingway _imposes_meaning onto inherently pointless events. It isn't as though women didn't die in childbirth at that time, but by having Catherine die arbitrarily strikes me as contrived for the purpose of theme - which to my mind calls into question the validity of that theme. The treacly descriptions of the couple's time prior to Catherine's death clumsily trolls for our emotional investment in order to make the tragedy even more poignant, yet instead it takes on a melodramatic flair as it insists on elevating these characters to a larger-than-life status.

In the end, Frederic Henry walks away in the rain, a lonely, tragic figure for whom only the hardest of hearts will lack sympathy. Catherine Barclay, as a character, lives and dies in order to produce this effect - that was the entire _meaining_ of his 'personal tragedy'. Ultimately, I get the feeling that she was only a prop, a circumstance - she happened to Frederic instead of occupying real space.

'A Farewell to Arms' is recommended for its descriptions of the war, which I think are still relevant today. But the love story between Frederic and Catherine is emotionally manipulative for the sake of advancing a theme, and doesn't hold up as well. Three-and-a-half stars.