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I've just completed A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. I must say I was disappointed.

One of my favorite novels is The Old Man and The Sea. I originally thought the writing style was meant especially for this book. Hemingway has a very elementary writing style. This would suite the characters in The Old Man and The Sea as they were very simple people without much education. It was perfect for that story and complimented it extremely well.

In this novel the same writing style, albeit changed a little with run on sentences, made the main character seem a little brutish and ignorant. If all the paragraphs containing booze were taken out of this book, there would be three pages left to read. The only real symbolism was the rain - the rain and death - the rain brought death or an end. This was painfully obvious as Catherine had the obligation of informing the reader about it.

The book read well enough for one with so much about nothing. It had such great potential. The man was an American fighting in the Italian army who fell in love with a Scottish nurse and was wounded - there is a beautiful story in that.

But the narrative was, again, brutish and elementary and really stole from the story. It added some realism and humanity to the novel because of the conversational narration but it stole something more than it gave.

The end was just a throw away. Catherine wasn't developed enough for an emotional attachment to be felt by the reader and I question if there really was one by the main character himself. He wasn't even in love with his child. It was nothing to him.

They 'get you' in the end. You always die in the end.... either because they hunt you or kill you gratuitously... whatever... the message has not been relayed effectively.

The only thing that stuck with me is the sentence where Catherine says she'll visit the main character in the night. That was just morbid and really didn't fit the character very well. It was like a square peg forced in a round hole.

The whole story the main character treats those around him not very well, they love him for it, and he boozes up every chance he gets. Vermouth, wines, whiskey, bourbon - you name it. There's several instances where cuss words are thrown around.

Don't get me wrong, these are some of my favorite activities. I live it - I don't need to read about it. When I read I want something more. Hemingway does not deliver in this novel at all.

I give it a half a quarter thumb up with cheese.

:king:[/i]

I always enjoyed and gotten more out of people talking about Hemingway than actually reading Hemingway I felt the same way about The Sun Also Rises when I had to read it in high school.

IMHO, I just don't think Hemmingway had an original world view, an original take on things. To me, a lot of today's fiction has the same problem: It's a lot of writing about very little.

Sorry if that sounds negative, but it's one of the reason I now read very little fiction.

Am I jaded or just reasonably disappointed? Or both?

Randy

Randy wrote:

Am I jaded or just reasonably disappointed? Or both?

Maybe a little of both. I love to read and I love to write. My philosophy is read what you enjoy. Which, by the way, is the same for my writing. I write what I enjoy reading. And that happens to be fictional thrillers, suspense, and crime novels.

Di

I felt like "A Farewell to Arms" was a great caricature of men, really. I still make fun of Rinaldi with friends because of his ridiculous nature and compulsive habit of saying "baby" way too much.

It's interesting to see the contrast between "A Farewell to Arms" and "The Old Man and The Sea" based on descriptions, but I'd put "The Old Man and The Sea" under his short stories category, as I feel it is far more similar to those.

When I read this in school, my English teacher passed out books and then immediately told us that "it's no surprise, Catherine dies at the end." There was no spoiler alert. lol

Hello Randy:

I kinda agree about the dissapointment with fiction. I've been reading more non fiction lately. "The Silent Twins", great! "The Ship of Ghosts", great, and best of all, "Blackwater". If you are intetested in the war, "Blackwater" is a must! It gives a whole different outlook. But in defense of fiction, check out Philip Roth, "The Human Stain", one of my all time favs. It's great for the vocab too. Another stand out, "The God of Small Things", Arundhati Roy.

Suzanne

A lot of discussion I've seen has been focused on love during wartime. I never got the vibe tenente every actually lived Catherine or really anything for that matter. He was a dude who made empty statements about love war etc but in the end was willing to be apathetic about it all? Am I off base?