A Farewell To Arms

thenakedanddead

So far this is the only Hemingway book I've been able to get through. "The Old man and the sea" bored me (to my shame) and, hard as i tried, I just couldn't bother with "For Whom the Bell Tolls", but "Arms" ranks as one of my favourite books, along with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", "The Catcher in the Rye" and "A Clockwork Orange".

Has anybody else read this? Any opinions? I know there are many people out there who find this overrated.

Eliot Rosewater

I think A Farewell to Arms is an excellent book. I love the Hemingway style, thought it may be a bit of an acquired taste. The more I read of him the more I like him.

I read it while interrailing around Europe. I read it either before or around my traveling through Northern Italy, so it was very interesting to see the place names in the book on all the train timetables!

Theres really two aspects to the book (like most Hemingway): the literal (what's actually happening) and the symbolic (what the people and the action symbolizes). What I like about Hemingway is that if you totally miss the symbolic significance the literal still has great attraction and merit.

As I said, I read it while traveling, so I didn't give it the full attention is deserved, and most of the symbolics escaped me. It's on the "re-read" list.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

not bakunin

I think the problem that many people have with some of Hemingway's longer works is their length and density which leads to some readers ending up bored with the slow-moving plotline. I think that a good way to get aquainted with Hemingway is by reading some of his brilliant short stories instead. I got a nice collection called "The first 49 stories", which is published by Arrow. I would recommend "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" in particular.

Overall, my favourite of Hemingway's works has to be Fiesta; The Sun Also Rises. Beautiful.