Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms": The Library Edition

Ernie cardinal1: It may not be a hard cover, but it looks and feels like a beautifully crafted and designed book! Very pleased with this soft cover masterpiece

Canada on Nov 29, 2023

William DeClue: I mostly liked it.

United States on Nov 04, 2023

Ryan: Yet another Amazon find!

Singapore on Oct 16, 2023

Robert L. Grohs: At times, I struggled with some of the paragraphs. The book is well written but goes in too man directions.
I'm not a big fan of the ending, but I enjoyed this master piece by Hemingway.

Canada on Sep 15, 2023

Jon Waters: A Farewell to Arms (1929) showcases young Hemingway’s skills as a world-class writer: He’s able to capture the nuances of his characters’ emotions and place them in detail among the circumstances of his other characters amidst the carnage and disarray of war. Quite an accomplishment for a writer not even 30 years old. Relying upon his experience as an American ambulance driver in the Italian Army during the last year of WWI, he displays the elation of the combatants in the early phase of war, when things were going well; then suffers the hell of being seriously wounded by an artillery shell; and, later, returned to the front when the Italian Army is retreating in total disarray after the successes of the new German divisions that are supporting the Austrian Army, experiences the anarchy and corruption of the defeated Italian conscript army. In defeat, it’s every man for himself, as Hem vividly shows.

His writing isn’t as staid and prosaic as some critics have made it out. An example: ”[T]here was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. . . I felt myself rush bodily out of...

United States on Jul 06, 2021

Mithrandir: In a world riven by conflict, a fact that truly threatens to define humanity, Hemingway’s masterpiece remains as poignant and wrenching as ever.

Utterly beautiful in its literary poeticism, utterly heartbreaking in its moral, it is understandable why this was lauded as the greatest American novel of the 20th century. Hemingway's style of writing is as unique as JD Salinger's or Joyce's. It is very sparse, purposeful and reserved. In the introduction his grandson writes that Hemingway wrote "on the principle of the iceberg. For the part that shows there are seven-eighths more underwater."

The story follows Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in WWI. He is wounded while eating cheese in a trench, gets a medal for bravery, and falls in love with a typically beautiful, devoted and idealistic English nurse while he is recovering. In their resultant journey, both physically and emotionally, Hemingway masterfully portrays the sheer futility of war and the ultimate truth of existence, that life marches inexorably on even after the most shattering of tragedies. It is an enlightened novel, a true exploration of the human...

United Kingdom on Jun 22, 2015

M. Sundström: That we are still reading, let alone buying, a 1920s book is clearly testament that we are dealing with a classic. A Farewell to Arms must have been pretty metallic when it first appeared on the bookshelves - it is rich in moral challenges which would have the staid gentry readership gasp. Hemingway does not shirk from murder, war-time prostitution, common law marriage, childbirth death, with the brutal collapse of warrior romanticism an unwavering undertone.

The problem for a modern reader is that you need a specialist's interest in that era to bolster the reading experience. The text might once have been provoking, but the moral spectrum of this day makes its most explosive paragraphs come across as tepid. Sepia is inexorably creeping in from the edges to tinge both story and style. The perceptive reader will no doubt still see scattered evidence of Hemingway's undoubted genius, but the hard edges have been so dulled that I would hesitate to recommend it for a newbie Hemingway explorer - it is, or rather has slowly become, connoisseur material rather than a general good read.

Hemingway used to duke it out with Scott Fitzgerald in print - a rather onesided bout,...

United Kingdom on Apr 26, 2009

Barron Laycock: This wonderful story by a young early Hemingway is perhaps, along with "For Whom The Bell Tolls", one of the finest anti-war novels ever written. In it we are introduced to a young and idealistic man, Frederick Henry, who, through love, experience and existential circumstance, comes to see the folly, waste, and irony of war, and attempts to make his own peace outside the confines of traditional conformity. For all of his obvious excesses, Hemingway was an artist compelled to delve deliberately into painful truths, and he attempted to do so with a style of writing that cut away all of the frills and artifice, so that at its heart this novel is meant as a exploration into what it means to confront the world of convention and deliberately decide to choose for what one feels in his heart as opposed to what one is expected to do. Of course, in so doing, the young ambulance driver becomes a full-grown adult, facing his trials with grace and courage. Still, what we are left with is a modern tragedy, one in which the characters must somehow attempt to resolve the irresolvable.
Yet in all this emotional turmoil and existential 'sturm-und-drang' of two star-crossed lovers caught in the...

United States on Mar 28, 2001