grrr... I've got to put the book club on hold for this one. I'm preparing for teacher certification exams and this one's not on the reading list.
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grrr... I've got to put the book club on hold for this one. I'm preparing for teacher certification exams and this one's not on the reading list.
I've only gotten to Chapter 16 and Miss Barkley is annoying. Especially in the beginning, the second or third time Henry and Catherine met she begged him to say "I love you". Who does that????
Do you think Hemingway's Miss Barkley was anything like the one he described in the book? Your right Em, I can't see a battlefield nurse acting like that.Quote:
Originally Posted by emily655321
I was hoping Miss Gage stuck around....darn it.Quote:
Miss Gage seems slightly more sane. I wish we'd gotten to know her better. I like Miss Gage and I like the priest. They seem quiet and level-headed
Well, I've only gotten to Chapter 22, so she may make a revival. But at the moment it isn't looking hopeful to me.
Finished the book two days ago and have been thinking about it since then (yeah, it is a slow and painful process for some of us so we thank you for your patience and... Please watch this space! :p)
Couple of points:
-I agree with most of the sentiments expressed regarding Cat... She seems so very out of place in the war but should we blame Hemingway for it? We usually assume that the lead character in a book = writer but that is not necessarily true, is it? It is possible that Hemingway is critical of men like Henry who fall simply for looks. We hardly ever see him think or say anything about Cat other than how 'beautiful' and 'wonderful' she is. That speaks more about Henry's character than Cat's, I believe, for falling for her.
-Another thing which I wonder is that... These characters seem very un-war-like in the midst of a terrible war when we take their words at their face value. However, is it possible that this is just a way of escape for them? The WWI is, after all, the first of its kind... For the first time, people start to question the validity of wars; patriotism seemed like an empty idea because they did not know mostly what they were fighting for (the Italian soldiers question this many times in the book). Also, the devastation it caused was at an unseen scale as well so it was only natural for people to be shocked by it. In the middle of this confusion, I wonder, if people, like Henry and Cat, seeked for a refuge. The constant repetition of how 'wonderful' and 'grand' things are along with how 'good' and 'darling' they are made me think that they might be simply trying to persuade themselves that it was so despite the raging war.
So is it possible that Henry and Cat are nothing but two scared, lost souls trying not to lose their sanity in the midst of a meaningless war by playing some kind of a pretending game (like children playing 'Mommies and Daddies')?
I found the exchange between the Swiss guards most absurd and funny! :D
Catherine is starting to remind me of Gollum:
I'm scared of the rain
I'm not scared of the rain
Oh I wish I wasn't scared of the rain...
sheesh...
If she lived in today you know she'd be one of those chick on the talk show.... My man cheated on me with my sister, but I love him with all my heart and want him back...
Scher, you make a good point. It does seem to me that the mood of the book attempts the "We're just a couple of kids caught in this crazy war" angle.
When I read this my first thought was, "You can say that again!" :p But I also considered whether that was the whole point. I realized that Hemingway wrote Catherine as such a silly thing deliberately, not through some oversight or sexist bias (well, he may still have had that, but not necessarily let it cloud the writing process). When he writes, "No one ever understood it except you," could Hemingway be alluding to the thrusting of responsibilty by "powers that be" onto the shoulders of those not capable of enduring it? No one cared that Catherine was just a "simple girl" when they began the war; no one thought of the people who would really be fighting it, all the children and peasants sucked into the storm and expected to carry such a burden. Do you think Catherine is supposed to inspire pity? I think it's a likely case, but I don't think Hemingway quite hit the mark. Whether he meant to or not... he created Catherine Barkley. :lol: :rolleyes:Quote:
"You're a fine simple girl," I said.
"I am a simple girl. No one ever understood it except you."
Excellent points here about Catherine. Let me open this up a little wider. Does anyone think that Hemingway's male characters are realistic? I don't mean Fredrick Henry, all the others. All the male characters other than the central character that is essential a stand in for Hemingway himself? Rinaldi? The Priest? Count Greffi?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4611956.stmQuote:
Fire razes Hemingway island haunt
Hemingway killed himself in 1961
A hotel known as a haunt of US novelist Ernest Hemingway has been destroyed in a fire in the Bahamas.
The blaze broke out on Friday morning at the Compleat Angler on the island of Bimini, 50 miles (80km) off Florida.
Owner Julian Brown was presumed dead. There were no immediate reports of other casualties in the incident.
The flames also consumed memorabilia housed in the hotel's museum on the famous writer, who worked there on to Have and Have Not in the 1930s.
Hemingway is said to have drunk at The Compleat Angler between fishing trips around Bimini.
The site was a key tourist attraction.
"It's a tremendous pain to bear," Bimini Chief Councillor Natasha Bullard-Rolle said.
Lost artefacts included books autographed by Hemingway and original photographs, she said.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Oh, that's a shame. :( But I'm a little relieved, too; when I read the first line I thought it might be the home with all the cats.
Since no one is responding to me, I'll just repond to myself. I feel that Hemingway has problems fleshing out characters, other than the stand in for himself. Rinaldi is just a little too cynical and the priest is a little too idealistic and the Count is a little too romantic. For minor characters, I think he gets away with it. But Catherine is not a minor charcter.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
It's too early in the morning for me to be attempting coherent sentences, but here I go.
I think all the characters are somewhat roughly sketched, but I attribute it to Hemingway's inexperience as an author at the time. Fred Henry does stand out as the only truly thought-through character, much the same way as an inexperienced art student's sketches will show a varying amount of detail throughout a drawing, because they only pay close enough attention to the parts with which they have trouble, or in which they hold the most interest. Hemingway strikes me as not yet having refined the craft of character development; he spends the most time on Henry, because he's the most important to him. At this point, he still needs to learn the discipline of creating a whole world and history and personality for each of his characters, even the minor ones. Instead, he's written caricatures; the characters play their specified roles, and feel duely fake. There are exceptions to this, though; I felt that the character of Aymo must have been based on someone Hemingway knew well. There is more behind the character than a person-shaped line-deliverer, so to speak; he has a history that Hemingway does not devulge, but which I felt, even in the sparse lines he delivered.
Another thing Hemingway still struggles with is constistency of character. Henry is the only character we get to know well, as Virgil points out, but what he benefits from in depth, he suffers from in breadth. Ernest writes bad romantic sequences, which is perhaps the reason Catherine is written so poorly as a whole; all of her lines are melodramatic love-talk. When Henry attempts such language, he is equally fakey. Hemingway seems to have drawn his inspiration primarily from the Hollywood films and literary conventions of his day, which tended toward hokey over-exuberance and lots of "darling, darling, darling's." This is perhaps the most glaring inconsistency that I've noticed in the book.
There are only two really good Hemingway novels, this one and The Sun Also Rises, which he wrote before AFTA. He wasn't inexperienced. This was his third novel. He was only a good novelist, in my humble opimion. But I think he was a great short story writer.Quote:
Originally Posted by emily655321
I would like to respond to some of the points have been made so far but before that I would like to ask you:
What do you think this novel is about? If you were to put it onto a shelf according to its theme, which one would that be?
The loss of innocence. A farewell to arms: the arms of war and arms of love.
I'm up to book 4, I don't have a problem with the male characters. To me they just seem like "buddies" we don't need to know anything indepth about them, unlike Catherine.
Is it bad that I'm really enjoying the parts without Catherine?