Bibliofreakblog

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

There are very few books I have never finished.  This is one of them.  And if that’s not bad enough, the sad truth is that I was not even reading it.  I was listening to it on CD in the car.  It was that boring.

I thought that I would like Hemingway.  He did, after all, write the best short story of all time.  When challenged to write one in seven words, he did it in six: “For Sale: Baby shoes.  Never Worn.”  Beautiful.  Poignant.  Heart-wrenching.

While writing one-line stories is great, string a bunch of terse sentences together over a couple hundred pages and you are in for one dry read.  I mean, minimalist style is one thing: boredom is quite another.

The story is about a stoic man’s man kind of guy in the army during WWI and his pregnant girlfriend.  If Hemingway is anything like his main character–and it is supposed to be largely autobiographical–he’s not going on my list of Dead People I’d Like to Have a Drink With.  

Don’t go looking for blood and gore in this book.  Battle scenes are over and done with in a matter of paragraphs.  While this is some nice descriptions of limbs dangling uselessly from tendons, most of it is shouting and not going what is going on.  Funny, neither does the reader.

All in all, there’s plenty of great writing about war, even about WWI.  If you want to find meaning (or lack thereof) in destruction, read some T.S. Eliot.  

If you like this book/author, you might like:

T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (P) by T.S. Eliot
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (P) by Wilfred Owen
Collected Poems, 1908-1956 (P) by Siegfried Sassoon
Slaughterhouse-5 (F) by Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22 (F) by Joseph Heller
The Vintage Book of War Stories (F) by Sebastian Faulks and Jörg Hensgen
The Things They Carried (F) by Tim O’Brien
All Quiet on the Western Front (F) by Erich Maria Remarqe
Under Fire (F) by Henri Barbusse
Johnny Got His Gun (F) by Dalton Trumbo
Storm of Steel (CNF) by Ernst Jünger
Thin Red Line (F) by James Jones
The Great Influenza (NF) by John M. Barry
The Great War and Modern Memory (NF) by  Paul Fussel

Other works by Ernest Hemingway:

In Our Time (F)
Men Without Women (F)
The Sun Also Rises (F)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (F)
To Have and Have Not (F)
The Torrents of Spring (F)
Death in the Afternoon (F)
The Dangerous Summer (F)
The Old Man and the Sea (F)
Across the River and Into the Trees (F)
A Moveable Feast (F)
Garden of Eden (F)
Green Hills of Africa (F)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (F)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro & Other Stories (F)
Islands in the Stream (F) 
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 (CNF)
The Nick Adams Stories (F)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (F) 
By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (CNF)
Winner Take Nothing (F)

With Charles Poore:

The Hemingway Reader (F)