A Farewell to Arms (edit title)

• Rated 4 stars

“Catherine is an awfully whiny woman. ”

• Rated 4 stars

“had to read it in class... Good war story, although sometimes it can get very boring and redundant.”

• Rated 4 stars

“Tragic.”

• Rated 5 stars

“Poetry, shear poetry!.”

• Rated 4 stars

“Had trouble getting into it but loved the last third of the book. ”

• Rated 0 stars

“ As a youth of 18, Ernest Hemingway was eager to fight in the Great War. Poor vision kept him out of the army, so he joined the ambulance corps instead and was sent to France. Then he transferred to Italy where he became the first American wounded in that country during World War I. Hemingway came out of the European battlefields with a medal for valor and a wealth of experience that he would, 10 years later, spin into literary gold with A Farewell to Arms. This is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two meet in Italy, and almost immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous nature of love in a time of war. During their first encounter, Catherine tells Henry about her fiancé of eight years who had been killed the year before in the Somme. Explaining why she hadn't married him, she says she was afraid marriage would be bad for him, then admits:

I wanted to do something for him. You see, I didn't care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know.

The two begin an affair, with Henry quite convinced that he "did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards." Soon enough, however, the game turns serious for both of them and ultimately Henry ends up deserting to be with Catherine.

Hemingway was not known for either unbridled optimism or happy endings, and A Farewell to Arms, like his other novels (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and To Have and Have Not), offers neither. What it does provide is an unblinking portrayal of men and women behaving with grace under pressure, both physical and psychological, and somehow finding the courage to go on in the face of certain loss. --Alix Wilber
”

• Rated 4 stars

“Here, Hemingway asserts that the only certain things in life are War and Death. He doesn't share his opinion on taxes. The protagonist grows from someone who cares little to someone who is capable of the most passionate love. The ending is tragic. The passage in which he begs God to spare his wife is beautiful. He knows she is going to die; but he hopes that she won't. In the end he is alone, cut off from family, country, even his former identity as a soldier having traded his uniform for civilian clothes. The desperate escape by boat from Italy to Switzerland in the middle of the night is one of my favorite passages. As is the aforementioned prayer.”

• Rated 4 stars

“Kinda hollywoodish, but still another classic from Hemingway.”

• Rated 0 stars

“When I first started this book, I wasn't sure if I would enjoy it... by the end of Book I, I couldn't put it down... and now having finished the book, I look forward to reading more of Hemingway's work”

• Rated 2 stars

“This is the first Hemingway novel I've read, and I didn't like it. The students I was teaching this to last spring hated it and I couldn't blame them. It was boring and depressing...I'm sure there are better war/romantic novels out there that would be more worth a teacher's and a student's time.”