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osprey_archer) wrote2013-02-17 08:04 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2013-02-17 08:04 pm
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Book Review: A Farewell to Arms
I have been reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. You might wonder why I was doing that, given that last time I read Hemingway I wrote a long post about what frustrated me about him (everything), but I’m working on a thing about Artists Responding to World War I and Hemingway’s response is kind of canonical, so.
A Farewell to Arms is a lot like The Sun Also Rises, in that nothing actually happens over the course of the book. Or, let me qualify this. Stuff totally happens. Italy loses a war! But in Hemingway’s hands this is never very interesting. Let’s give the book its due, though: it is not nearly as clogged with existential despair as The Sun Also Rises, even though it has a war that it could use as an excuse.
The war is really kind of a sideshow in the novel, though. The main story is a romance, more or less, except that the normal romance part is scattered through the first hundred pages. The narrator whose name I can’t remember doesn’t mean to love Catherine the nurse, Catherine totes loves him, he realizes he’s in love with her, then he gets injured and they start sleeping together as he convalesces, because nothing says sexytimes like nearly getting your leg blown off. It is way less h/c-y than it sounds, presumably because h/c would require character dynamics and maybe even a little bit of conflict.
It is kind of reminiscent of Twilight, in that the Catherine/Narrator conversations consist mostly of chatting about how much they love each other and wish never to be parted. Oh, and sometimes Catherine tells the narrator about how she has no thoughts or feelings or desires of her own, because they are the same person, and her main goal in life is never to irritate him or make any demands on him.
I am pretty sure Hemingway thinks Catherine is the perfect woman. This philosophy is probably why Hemingway went through four wives.
I should probably find Hemingway’s treatment of Catherine incandescently enraging, but it’s hard to muster up a lot of emotion about this book. It’s not that it’s dull, exactly - though of course, a steady diet of monographs may have warped my sense of dullness - but it’s weirdly lacking in the ability to arouse emotion.
Why is this the classic World War I book? Was it the only book that portrayed the war with sufficient cynicism to catch the zeitgeist? Because cynicism is pretty much the only thing it has going for it.
A Farewell to Arms is a lot like The Sun Also Rises, in that nothing actually happens over the course of the book. Or, let me qualify this. Stuff totally happens. Italy loses a war! But in Hemingway’s hands this is never very interesting. Let’s give the book its due, though: it is not nearly as clogged with existential despair as The Sun Also Rises, even though it has a war that it could use as an excuse.
The war is really kind of a sideshow in the novel, though. The main story is a romance, more or less, except that the normal romance part is scattered through the first hundred pages. The narrator whose name I can’t remember doesn’t mean to love Catherine the nurse, Catherine totes loves him, he realizes he’s in love with her, then he gets injured and they start sleeping together as he convalesces, because nothing says sexytimes like nearly getting your leg blown off. It is way less h/c-y than it sounds, presumably because h/c would require character dynamics and maybe even a little bit of conflict.
It is kind of reminiscent of Twilight, in that the Catherine/Narrator conversations consist mostly of chatting about how much they love each other and wish never to be parted. Oh, and sometimes Catherine tells the narrator about how she has no thoughts or feelings or desires of her own, because they are the same person, and her main goal in life is never to irritate him or make any demands on him.
I am pretty sure Hemingway thinks Catherine is the perfect woman. This philosophy is probably why Hemingway went through four wives.
I should probably find Hemingway’s treatment of Catherine incandescently enraging, but it’s hard to muster up a lot of emotion about this book. It’s not that it’s dull, exactly - though of course, a steady diet of monographs may have warped my sense of dullness - but it’s weirdly lacking in the ability to arouse emotion.
Why is this the classic World War I book? Was it the only book that portrayed the war with sufficient cynicism to catch the zeitgeist? Because cynicism is pretty much the only thing it has going for it.
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I was also surprised that A Farewell to Arms was in Italy. I figured it would be in France. But then, I also figured it would be more war and less sappy romance, so what do I know?
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Graves is always readable, and of course he was a war poet too so you may encounter him that way? I suppose of all writers, when you mention Artists Responding to WWI my mind immediately leaps to Wilfred Owen, but then he was a poet not a novelist. (Arguably also Tolkien, but that might be my personal interest showing :-D)
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I think Tolkien's Dead Marshes, at least, show some clear WWI influence: the images of soldiers floating up from underwater. And the Shire is in a sense an attempt to regain the world that WWI destroyed.
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I found I had a total absence of knowledge when it came to American war poets, and I felt I should at least know some names, so I went to Wikipedia where I found this:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pro_Patria_(1917)/Better_to_Die - in 1917! Which of course made me think of http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html written around the same time...
Although I had to wonder what Owen would have said if Florence Earle Coats had been able to ask him in 1917 - 'do you *want* us to come in with all our supplies and troops, or would you prefer we just sit this one out?' Interesting conversation to be had in Poet Heaven there, I think.
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