A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is listed in 1001 Books for

• The Sun Also Rises (1926), see my thoughts here
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• To Have and Have Not (1937)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), see my thoughts here
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952, read ages ago pre-blog)

(I've also reviewed 'Out of Season' (1923), a short story which is said to mark a turning point in his writing. Now, I know it's fashionable to deride Hemingway because he's 'a dead white male' and is guilty of flaws typical of his generation.  Critics of A Farewell to Arms also like to snipe that the realism of his war scenes are not authentic because (as 1001 Books somewhat pompously says) the novelist's combat experience was more limited than that of his protagonist.  But so what?  He is a marvellous writer.  My favourite is For Whom the Bell Tolls, but A Farewell to Arms is very good too. There is a brief moment when the Italians are retreating that exemplifies Hemingway's terse depiction of the brutality of war, drawing our attention to something we might not have understood about the exigencies of warfare. Frederic is seeking instructions for what to do with the wounded.

'The orders are that we stay here.  You clear the wounded from here to the clearing station.' 'Sometimes we clear from the clearing station to the field hospitals too,' I said. 'Tell me, I have never seen a retreat—if there is a retreat how are all the wounded evacuated?' 'They are not.  They take as many as they can and leave the rest.' 'What will I take in the cars?' 'Hospital equipment.' (p.187 of  my print edition, Scriber 2003.)

We all know that WW1 was a slaughterhouse, but I was not aware that wounded men were left behind at the mercy of the advancing Germans.  All those bereaved wives and mothers who were told that their men 'died immediately and would not have felt a thing' must have recoiled in horror when they read that scene. OTOH There's also some vulgar conversations about women which grate, and the preoccupation with drinking isn't very interesting either.  The love affair between Catherine and Frederic tested my patience a bit.  I had made a short note to the effect that Catherine's submissiveness is tiresome and the soppy love talk was boring, so I was not surprised it described as 'sentimental' in 1001 Books:

A Farewell to Arms is set in Italy and Switzerland during the First World War.  The very sparse and unadorned style of Hemingway's narrator Frederic Henry provides a realistic and unromanticised account of war on the Italian front and is typical of the writing style that was to become the hallmark of Hemingway's later writing.  Henry's descriptions of war are in sharp relief to the sentimental language of his affair with Catherine, an English nurse he meets while recovering from an injury in Turin.  (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, ABC Books, 2006 Edition, ISBN: 9780733321214, p 341.)

The narration by John Slattery is generally very good, but the upper class English accents are not very convincing.  Also, (though no fault of the narration but rather just a feature of audiobooks which don't scamper over text the way that the eye can), there's quite a bit of repetitive dialogue, which probably wouldn't be as noticeable or irritating in the written text. But this is an early novel... A Farewell to Arms was made into a film in 1932.  

 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

 Author: Ernest Hemingway
Title: A Farewell to Arms
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006, first published 1929
Narrated by John Slattery ISBN: 9780743564373, 8 CDs
Source: Kingston Library (though I have a print edition too.)