A Farewell To Arms

After reading “To Have and Have Not” I was kind of done with Hemingway. Thus when a friend of mine suggested this book I was hesitant to say the least.

What a pleasant surprise I found waiting in the book for me. A story of war, a story of romance. And little of the selfish one can find in the above mentioned.

This book takes you to the depths of the Great War. Hemingway semi-autobiographically has made a first person character who is an ambulance driver at the Italian war front.
The Great War always baffles me, as it seems no-one was really keen on fighting and no-one knew exactly what was going in. This book exemplifies this perfectly.

The subtle and the featherweight sentences of Hemingway convey more power than other hefty and lengthy sentences by other greats in literature. A good book, a beautiful story.

Interesting tour of Italy during WWI but that's about all I can say for this. I read this because I was interested in learning more about Hemingway's style, specifically his sentence construction, which incidentally was one of the best parts of the book as it was an enjoyable and easy read my eyes glided through the text easily. But story-wise everything about this book felt hallow, there were a few sequences that I felt accurately depicted the horrors of war but these seemed to be cheapened by the very shallow interactions and romance between Frederick and Catherine.

Except for a few clunky romantic dialogues, which, to be fair, might've been a reflection of the time, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. This read way better than Old Man and the Sea, which I have to revisit to see if I've changed my opinion on it. There was the bit about horse racing that went a tad too long I felt, but without that we wouldn't get the gem of a phrase ‘throwing benches'. The action hurts physically sometimes, the deaths come out of nowhere and still you have to perform duties as if it's normal life. Sentences were simple yet carried so much weight, I shudder at how much effort went into editing this book.

It's life, it goes on.

I have not read any Hemingway since The Old Man and the Sea in high school, and that made hardly any impression on me at all; so we may as well say that this is my first exposure to him.

I certainly understand why the parodies of his writing are as they are, why he is considered so easy to imitate for humorous effect, but My word! how far superior to him imitators is Mr. Hemingway. His writing captures, with the fewest words possible, exactly each place and person and feeling. Without any obvious attempt, Hemingway depicts bleakness and self-pre-ocupied love and war-torn scenery so clearly that it quite took me away from home to Italy of a century ago.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Farewell to Arms and intend to read at least For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The first Hemingway I read and it has to be about WWI. Well, besides this, it didn't really impact me a lot. Some parts were written very well, other parts felt like a big page filler. Overall it felt like a good book, but not more than that. Still, it gave me an interesting in reading more from Hemingway, so from this point of view not all was lost.