Farewell To Arms

Rating:
Summary: Not Hemmingway's best work, but very good
Review: Perhaps I have an affinity for Hemmingway that prevents me from giving this book the three stars it probably deserves, but there were extraordinary moments of literary greatness in this book. I think the reason this book catches a lot more flak than some of his others is because of the subtitly in which he delivers messages about life in this book and a lot of people just miss the point entirely.

For those that don't know, this is a story about love and loss and the painful reality of being at war for reasons you once justified but no longer understand.

However, for all the moments of greatness in this book, there is a certain lack of depth that Hemmingway creates for the main characters in the beginning of the book that continually hovers over them throughout the rest of the story. We care about what happens to the characters, but not to the extent to which I believe he intended us to care. There is this instrinsic lack of meaning and purpose behind many of their actions so that we don't understand and even care about some of the things they do.

For all this book's shortcomings though, it still is a vivid, lively, and beautiful portrayal of a man coping with the harsh realities of his life that he created for himself.

Rating:
Summary: This Book was Horrible!!
Review: A Farewell to Arms is the story of WWI as told by main character Lieutenant Fredick Henry, an American ambulance driver in the Italian army. Through a friend of his, Rinaldi, he meets Catherine Barkley, and at first is not at all interested. But soon they are spending every night together, hiding their affair from most, and avoiding marriage. Before long, Catherine is pregnant and Lt. Henry comes down with sypilis. When he and his commandees are convicted of treason because they retreated, he hides in a river to avoid being exectuted.

Everyone knows that you get more out of a book if you read it for pleasure, and not for required reading. However, i don't think that makes much of a difference in this book. The characters are poorly developed, and they change their minds repeatedly, without a clue from Hemmingway as to why they made an uncharacteristic decision.

Henry's character is so emotionally detatched, its hard to believe that he is a human, or that Hemmingway even actually modelled him after one. He may have modelled him after himself, but all that says is that Hemmingway was pretty boring. Henry does not care that his son dies, and just leaves the hospital without any trace of emotion.

Overall, this book just stinks. As far as war books go, if this is supposed to be one of the best, then there is absolutely no point in reading the others.

Rating:
Summary: A Farewell to Arms Book Review
Review: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway was not one of my favorite books to read, however, it was not the worst. It had a well developed theme, but I did not like the pace or the ending of the book. First, let me tell you what I liked about this book.
Basically this book is about an American in the Ialian army(Lieutenant Henry)who falls in love with an English Nurse(Catherine Berkley). Henry and Catherine both enjoy their jobs but when they fall in love, their work makes it hard for them to see each other. This theme is a combination of two elements: love and war. These two elements battle each other in the novel. Henry and Catherine want to be together but the war often separates them. This is a well developed theme which occurs throughout the whole book. A good example of this is after Henry's knee heals up, he is ordered back to the front. Neither Henry nor Catherine want to leave each other but Henry must get on the train to the front. Henry and Catherine end up not seeing each other for many days. However not being able to see each other leads to Henry and Catherine abandoning the war and running away to Switzerland.
What I personally didn't like about the book was the pace and the ending. While reading it I often was bored. I felt that there could have been more events that happened to Lieutenant Henry. I also felt that what took Hemmingway a couple pages to write could have been summed up in a paragraph or two. I thought that Hemmingway dragged the story out. I also did not like the ending. I'm sure everyone wanted the story to end happily but of course it didn't.
Overall, I would say that this was just an "ok" book. It did not hold my attention and I would have liked it to have had another ending as most people probably would have liked. However, Hemmingway does a great job of portraying the theme of love and war in this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Farewell to Character Development
Review: I just finished "A Farewell to Arms" yesterday. And I have to conclude that if a main character dies in a book, and you actually feel good about it, you can safely say that the story was more than a little lacking.

Let's stop kidding ourselves. This is an awful book, and frankly, Hemingway isn't a great writer either. To heck with this being a "classic": It's dull, borderline-pointless, and worst of all badly written. Numerous times I was reading the book, I thought to myself, I could write something so much better than this!

The main character, Frederic Henry, is so lacking in a personality that I'd be hard-pressed to list five character traits that he possesses. Catherine, his love interest, isn't any better. The dialogue is so mundane and repetitive that you'll wonder what in the world ol' Ernest was thinking when he penned it. Perhaps he took one too many swigs at that whiskey or vermouth or cognac or the 273 other alcoholic beverages that are named throughout the novel.

I gave this two stars simply for Rinaldi, the only halfway-entertaining character in the entire book. Do yourself a favor and move onto bigger and better things.

Rating:
Summary: The Powers of Love and the Destruction of War
Review: This book has its goods and bads. The good thing of this book is that Hemingway makes it what it is by incorporating the dramatic dealings with love and war into it. I don't think that anybody could of told his story any better since love and war together can be pretty tough topics. Anyways, Hemingway shows how WWI is by giving the reader an up close view on what is happening either with the war as a whole or with Henry. Hemingways also displays the powers of love one can have for another and how they can consume one. The bad thing of this book, though, is in the end Henry ends up like he was before he ever met Catherine. But hey, what can you say. Some stories have to end bad while really to come to think of it, still making the book interesting.

The main character, Henry, is in an American who is an ambulance driver for the side of Italy during WWI. After a while of going through the hardships of war he realizes that war itself is not a game and believes that he is in the wrong place. While out on a run Henry's leg get injured by a mind so he goes to a hospital and recooperates from his surgery. During that time he meets a British nurse and immediatly falls in love. Henry months later goes back to the war, and decides to runaway and come back to the one he loves because his love for Catherine is so great, and he knows it is the same for her. Plus, he knows she is pregnant, which makes him want to be there to comfort her in anyway. They somehow meet up and make the decision to escape the surroundings they are in. Although, that is not the whole ending, the reader will have to read what else happens to find out for themselves. Surely one will be shocked hungry for more to read towards the end.

The book is very good, don't get me wrong. I just wish and I am sure others wish that there could have been a happier ending, rather than what it was. I believe that if you are a reader looking for a good love story with a little war in the mix its for you but otherwise I wouldn't suggest one to read it just to read it.

Rating:
Summary: How can one review Hemingway?
Review: The first Hemingway I read, as university freshman. Was reading during a boring English class, came to the part where blood drips onto the hero's head in an ambulance, and then I passed out temporarily. It got me out of the rest of the English class.

I read in a biography that Hemingway wrote so accurately both historically and geographically that some Italian historians believed he'd witnessed the fighting in and above the Isonzo/Soca Valley personally. He didn't, he got no further east than the Piave Valley. The fighting described takes place in the Slovenian Alps, then Austria, east of Tarcento, and very far east of Belluno. In Kobarid, Slovenia, in the valley of the fighting, we visited a small war museum in 1997, maybe the world's most impressive: photos of soldiers with faces half shot off, and other carnage, very effective in curing any foolish notion that war is romantic. Nothing in the book reflects the horror of the war like the displays in this museum, which contain photos of soldiers, emplacements, and fighting far above the treeline in the Alps in the dead of winter. At the entrance of the museum hangs an enormous poster showing Hemingway's face, and you can buy A Farewell to Arms in any of five languages there.

The worst fighting of the war between the Austrians and Italians took place in the Isonzo Valley. The book remains one of my favorites, in memory. For a somewhat comical "Heimat" film made after the war, showing the fighting between the Austrian Kaiserjäger and the Italian Alpini at Col d' Lana in the Dolomites, see "Berg in Flammen" staring the popular mountaineer Luis Trenker. This fighting took place at the same altitude as the war in the Soca Valley, on very steep, high, ice and snow covered rock. You can get the video from amazon.de, but you will then need an international video player to view it (Europe uses 50/sec, not 60/sec frequency AC current).

Rating:
Summary: Great? Well, there is greatness in it-- and great imbalance
Review: [NB: review contains spoilers]

There are some truly admirable sections in this book-mostly involving descriptions of men at war, in various phases-but these are not matched by the treatment of the central relationship in the novel, that of the hero and heroine. For all Hemingway's attempts to render the general human affliction of armed conflict something more personal and specific via the wartime romance between his two principal characters, the end result of "A Farewell to Arms" is that the reader is left less with a new appreciation of something profound and terrible than with an odd (and unfulfilling) sense of detachment from the human condition. One simply asks at the end: That's it?

The conclusion of the novel is clearly intended to be tragic: after surviving a series of wartime perils, the hero escapes to Switzerland with his pregnant common-law wife-only to see her die there in childbirth. Yet the feeling that we have never been allowed to know much about this character, Catherine the nurse-and therefore aren't in any better a position to mourn her loss (or learn from it) than is the benumbed hero, Lt. Henry, who simply walks away from her corpse-is almost as irritating as it is inescapable. The palpable tension of the striking war sequences and the couple's desperate flight to peace and freedom is thus followed (not to say trumped) by a deflatingly feckless conclusion that offers no more illumination of the great issues at hand (war/peace/life/death) than one gets from a vulgar bumper sticker. Do we really need Hemingway to tell us that Sh*t happens?

This just isn't, by any measurement, much of a love story. It has only a beginning and an (abrupt) end-its internal plot never thickens, it has no arc. The lieutenant enters the relationship with no intention whatsoever of falling in love; nurse Catherine, for her part, likewise seems more interested in companionship than love as such (having lost a fiance to the war earlier). But what ho, human nature does not yield to vain design, and the two somehow do fall in love-and in pretty short order. Fine, okay, the reader can live with the fact itself. The problem here is that neither the transition to nor the expression of the resulting (and all-consuming) love affair is developed or described in any real sense. The principals simply decide they are in love, and proceed to profess this feeling to one another in curiously disjointed (and sometimes painfully stilted) dialogue for the remainder of their time together in the novel.

The lieutenant specifically forbids himself thoughts of his beloved when away at the front, so we get no account from the first-person narrator of any growing feeling or new commitment toward her. Catherine's character lacks the dimension of interior monologue, of course, so we know nothing of her thoughts; adding to this distance, moreover, she is given a background even sketchier than that of the nearly-anonymous lieutenant, and her interaction with secondary characters fairly defines the term superficial. In short, we see nothing of Catherine save externals-and not much of those.

What we get when the two are together, alas, is not mutually-assisted self-exploration, or even mutual relationship development a la Rocky and Adrian ("We fill each other's gaps."). Nope, what we get is a great deal of chatting around things in place of talk about them: Henry does not articulate to Catherine either his feelings about the campaign horrors he has just been through (though she asks him to) or his feelings about her as such. We get a lot of very specific food and drink orders (especially the drink; hey, it's Hemingway) and a number of discreetly-placed scene omissions (when they're, y'know, doing it)-but virtually snot about why this is happening or what any of it means to either party.

Perhaps inarticulateness is the point-or at least a point-that Hemingway is trying to make: war renders every one of us less human, and the participants' reduced state (Be...less than you can be!) incorporates a kind of dumbing down of our desire and ability to communicate with one another, first on the level of nations, then as individuals. While this sounds good as a rationale, it contains one great whomping inconsistency: in his relationships with various secondary characters (the priest, several soldiers, Count Greffi), the hero clearly tries to articulate his feelings on a number of great issues. He will not let war silence his humanity. With the character he is supposed to love, however, and whose death is meant to affect us profoundly as the culmination of the novel, the lieutenant hasn't tried to articulate jack. He's just there. She's just there. It's a war. They're in love. They escape. She croaks anyway. That's a wrap. Strike the set. Chinese for lunch?

If the two lines above sound like a movie pitch-bingo. I doubt Hemingway set out to write a screenplay, but let's face it: movies thrive on striking externals, and this is a novel chock full of 'em. Thrilling war scenes major and minor; a handsome young American in picturesque foreign locations; a tall, beautiful, and tragic (or at least "tragic") heroine. Color in a few of the omitted love scenes and you're ready to start shooting. You may even win some awards: there's just enough to think about here to raise the whole enterprise safely above criticism as exploitation-and even, in the eyes of some, to the level of art. If you're a producer, what's not to like? The surprising thing is that Hollywood has made this movie a mere three times to date (1932, 1957 and a mini-version in 1966). How long do we have to wait, I ask you, before we get to see Keanu and Uma in "A Farewell to Arms" for the new millenium?

In sum, this is not a great novel, but rather a novel with greatness in it-and a great imbalance between its strengths and weaknesses. If this imbalance finds redress in another medium (I haven't seen any of the films), swell. As a novel, in any case, A Farewell to Arms surely deserves to be read, appreciated and criticized on its merits, not as a proto-screenplay. So read it, appreciate it, criticize it. At the very least, its men-at-war scenes will grip and move you, as they have doubtless gripped and moved others for generations.

All told, I give it two Italian hand grenades up.

Rating:
Summary: Profundity enveloped in simplicity
Review: Hemingway never ceases to amaze. His simplistic, yet profound prose proves to be a paradox in and of itself. While the sheer simplicity of his laconic dialogue may disappoint those hoping for some intensely complex and bombastic verbiage, it does, however, impress those among us who can appreciate the genius expressly confined in such brevity. What his often maligned simplicity lacks in its..well...complexity, Hemingway more than makes up for in his customary singular proclivity for superlative dialogue. Hemingway, in effect, revolutionized the art of dialogue in American literature - and, after reading A Farewell to Arms, it's easy to see why.

A Farewell to Arms emanates forth the perplexing and provocative dualities of war and peace, true love and sex, hope and despair, & idealism and cynicism - to name a few. Tenente(as I prefer to call him over Frederick) is, of course, a rough transference of Hemingway himself onto paper. One can, without a doubt, see a lot of Hemingway's characteristic brusque gruffness in the protagonist throughout the novel. Tenente undergoes a stark and rather pronounced transformation, or epiphany if you will, that undoubtedly makes A Farewell to Arms one of the truly memorable works of the 20th Century.

Although I wanted to throw the book against the wall after the tragic ending, I nonetheless refuse to denounce Hemingway's undeniable greatness as witnessed in A Farewell to Arms.

Rating:
Summary: Great...
Review: what can I say its Hemingway, every detail,smell and feeling he puts it into such wonderful words,like you can almost taste it and you see it..I enjoyed the book very much, I would not pass it up ,but a warning Hemingway is not for everyone he is a very romantic writer,so becareful what you get into.

Rating:
Summary: I'm sorry, but this book just didn't do it for me
Review: Ok, I tried to like this book, I really did. But it just didn't do it for me.
I had always considered Hemingway as somewhat overrated but I hadn't really given him a fair shot. Then I read A Moveable Feast which I really really liked so I thought, "Oh, I was being too judgemental in my 'youth' (14 y.o.)" so I picked up A Farewell to Arms and with a really positive attitude.
At first I really liked it but the middle third I found so boring and overly detailed with things about the war and the clothes and what they ate and every inch they moved--things that didn't interest me and that I really didn't need to know. Then, while Hemingway puts so much energy into that part of the book other parts like characterization are neglected. I felt really distanced from the main character and the emotions didn't really resonate with me. First of all, the love interest, Catherine I found completely banal and annoying. She doesn't seem to be realistic about anything and all she can say is "darling, I love you. do you love me? we should get married. I love you darling. do you love me, darling?" It just struck me as really pathetic and really flat as character development.
Having said all this I must add that Hemingway still manages to have some beautiful passages and scenes in this book. Some statements about life and death and love come to mind which really struck me. But, the rest of it still didn't work for me.
I'm sorry to anyone who loves this book; it is a classic, afterall, but it just left me flat (and bored through the middle).
I still plan on reading more of Hemingway so I'll reserve final judgement but I'm beginning to think my 14 year old self wasn't so far from the mark. (Maybe A Moveable Feast was a fluke? We'll see.)