A Farewell to Arms

[itstito]

What struck you about this book the first time you read it, and how has your opinion of it changed over the years? For me, it has been a strange evolution: at first I thought his style too sparse for my taste, then I realized how every time the book appeared differently to me because of the unadorned use of words and phrases.

[keilj]

When I first tried to read it, I got bored and stopped.

I picked it up a couple of years later. The beginning still struck me as a bit boring. But elements from throughout the story stuck with me. I like the army stuff. The part about shooting deserters was very gripping and memorable. I like very much the middle of the book, where he and the girl are sneaking out of the country. And the ending was very, very interesting (particularly when you know about Hemingway's real relationship with a nurse).

I can't remember how Hemingway worded it -but the part about sitting in the room with a person who has just passed away - and how they no longer seem like a person, but like a statue, is an incredibly true passage

I like many of his other books better (Islands in the Stream, For Whom the Bell Tolls) - but Farewell is a very good book

[irishpixieb]

I didn't like it when i first read it because it was "dry", but now I still don't like it because of the ending. In my opinion, what the heck?! haha

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Hemingway was on deck to round out a trio of three American authors that I had not read, those being; Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. I wasn't sure which Hemingway to select, it would have been a crap shoot for me. The timing of this thread was enough to push me in the direction of "A Farewell to Arms". It now resides in my Nook, soon to get started.

[Sancho]

Good books can speak to people of different backgrounds and from different times and places, and this book has certainly spoken to me during my time. As a young man I was fascinated with the army parts, then a little later I became infatuated with the love story, still later I came to admire E.H.’s language.

When I saw Lake Como in Italy for the first time, my first thought was of Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley.

Hope you enjoy the book, Gill. As a warm-up you may like some of Hemingway’s short stories. I’d start with the collection, In Our Time; it’s his early Nick Adams stories. (Nick is basically a stand-in for Ernest as he journeys through life) Some of the more famous stories in the collection are: Indian Camp, Big Two Hearted River, The Battler.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

...Some of the more famous stories in the collection are: Indian Camp, Big Two Hearted River, The Battler.

Thanks so much for sharing that Sancho.
I'm short on three sided coins to flip, but we do have a small creek that runs through our yard, which is the closest thing to a river, so I'll go with Big Two Hearted River. (I just downloaded In Our Time)

.

[Sancho]

Big Two Hearted River is a good one. Hemingway never tells us what Nick is healing from, but you certainly get the feeling he’s recovering from something traumatic. Probably the war. And I also got the sense that Ernest wrote that story to help heal himself. He’d been badly injured in WWI where he was a volunteer ambulance driver for the Italian Army – if I’m remembering correctly.

I think what makes the story so powerful and timeless is that it’s a story that has always been part of our condition as humans. Which is to say, young men (also women) have always gone off to war, and when they came home many of them struggled to fit back in to society and to come to grips with what they had seen and what they had done.

The buffalo picture from the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge that you and I were chatting about a couple of weeks ago was taken while I was working out of Fort Sill for a few weeks. One of the guys I worked with there was an Army Sergeant who, and I’m not exaggerating, looked like hell. His face was all torn up. He was missing teeth. His nose was lopsided. He had lots of scars and skin grafts on his lower face and neck. I could see what parts his Kevlar had protected during the injury and I could also see that he’d been wearing his goggles. It was evident that his body armor was of the type that had a high collar, and yet one of his skin grafts had totally screwed up one of his neck tattoos – bummer dude.

Anyway, we were out on a coffee break, and I said to him, “Damn, Sergeant, what happened to you?”

He matter-of-factly said, “I.E.D.” and then grinned.

I said, “Ouch!”

He said, “Bah, no big whoop.” Then he held up his hands and wiggled his fingers at me and said, “See, still got all my digits.”

[Darcy88]

I cracked this book open last night and am already half-way done. Its magnificent. Its been said a million times but I must say it again: I love the simplicity and the flow of Hemingway's style. Its like all the other Hemingway I've read, full of men full of testosterone and booze. Its themes are love and war and there are no greater themes than these.

[Helga]

I read it first when I was 15 and loved it and I have always loved it, I see nothing boring about it. Hemingway manages to put confusing things into simple words and I loved the ending! this had to happen for him to go on.

[Alexander III]

I love this book, and the fact that my grandparents reside near the lake como region, and it reminded me of many summers in my childhood, I also like his charcterisation of the Italians, it feels so strangley real and akward and honest. But His style is the best bit, simply amzaing.

[dfloyd]

better than A Farewell to Arms. But it the second best Hemingway. The best being a postwar love story: The Sun Also Rises. I have read all the novels and short stories of Hemingway, missing only his newspaper accounts and his bullfighting documentaries. While Hemingway did have some losers along the way, with books such as The Sun Also rises and A Farewell to Arms and his short story collections he would have been one of America's most talented writers.