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Loading... A Farewell to Arms (original 1929; edition 1929)by Ernest Hemingway
Work detailsA Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929)
This book just carried me away to another time and place with so little effort that at the end I was amazed at the journey. (  ) clinec1 | Jun 10, 2013 |    tauruseducation | Jun 7, 2013 | Hemingway's theme is pretty clear - "The world breaks every one". Despite Frederic's good luck - finding love, escaping death, getting away from the war - in the end the world still breaks him. As a love story, the novel is very one-sided. Catherine really only exists as seen through Frederic's eyes - and she seems a bit crazy to use her word. There's a curious lack of honor in this book. (  ) tjsjohanna | May 19, 2013 | Took me many years and many books to finally get to this one. I listened to the novel. I think thatif I had not been listening, I might have reshelved the book. Description, setting, the war - extraordinary. Characters are done well but Catherine and Henry left me cold. No tears. Liked the Italians. A long time since I first read Hemingway so maybe.., (  ) librarian1204 | Apr 27, 2013 | The way I listened to the audiobook version of this novel narrated by John Slattery didn’t do it justice. Being on holidays, away from home and my usual commuting and exercising habits, I listened in short grabs, either just before going to sleep or when I woke up in the early hours of the morning and wanted to get back to sleep again. I had to re-listen to bits I'd missed by dozing off, which does not make for a smooth and cohesive literary experience. In addition, it’s a reasonably short book, but it’s taken me a month or so to finish, which is not good when I have such a poor memory for plot details. That said, I enjoyed the book much more than I thought I would. I've not read a huge amount of Hemingway, although I've read enough to know that he's not my favourite writer. However, I like the deceptive simplicity of Hemingway's prose - a simplicity extraordinarily difficult to achieve. I also like the way in which Hemingway used his personal experience of being a volunteer ambulance driver at the Italian front during World War I to ground the plot. And I appreciate the complete absence bull fighting in this novel, a passion of Hemingway's to which I cannot relate. Slattery’s narration is excellent. Thankfully, he’s not one of those male narrators who heads into the falsetto range when voicing a female character. Overall, this has been an unusual audiobook experience for me, but a worthwhile one nevertheless. ( )2  KimMR | Apr 15, 2013 |
 In its sustained, inexorable movement, its throbbing preoccupation with flesh and blood and nerves rather than the fanciful fabrics of intellect, it fulfills the prophecies that his most excited admirers have made about Ernest Hemingway... in its depiction of War, the novel bears comparison with its best predecessors. But it is in the hero's perhaps unethical quitting of the battle line to be with the woman whom he has gotten with child that it achieves its greatest significance. It is a moving and beautiful book. Is contained inErnest Hemingway: Four Novels by Ernest Hemingway The Novels Of Ernest Hemingway . by Ernest Hemingway Five Novels: The Sun Also Rises / A Farewell to Arms / To Have and Have Not / The Old Man and the Sea / For Whom the Bell Tolls (FOLIO SOCIETY) by Ernest Hemingway Three Novels: The Sun Also Rises; A Farewell to Arms; The Old Man and the Sea; Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway Has the adaptationHas as a reference guide/companionErnest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: A Reference Guide (Greenwood Guides to Literature) by Linda Wagner-Martin Has as a studyHas as a student's study guide
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0684801469, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:05:49 -0500) By turns romantic and harshly realistic, Hemingway's story of a tragic romance set against the brutality and confusion of World War I cemented his fame as a stylist and as a writer of extraordinary literary power. A volunteer ambulance driver and a beautiful English nurse fall in love when he is wounded on the Italian front.… (more) (summary from another edition) |
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