Product Description

The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- is one of the greatest moments in literary history. A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was 30 years old, represents a new romanticism for Hemingway.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1442 in Books
• Published on: 1995-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.com
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

From Library Journal
These dual Hemingways are the latest volumes in the Scribner Paperback Fiction series (Classic Returns, February 15, p. 187). They offer quality trade size editions, featuring attractive covers and easily readable type size. Two of the greats.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1929. Like his early short stories and his novel The Sun Also Rises, the work is full of the disillusionment of the "lost generation" expatriates. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I, the American lieutenant Frederick Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him after he is wounded. She becomes pregnant but refuses to marry him, and he returns to his post. Henry deserts during the Italians' retreat after the Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, leaving Henry desolate.

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Customer Reviews

__Underscore.
What beauty. What excellent prose. There is little I can say that has not already been said about Hemingway's style. So, I will keep my review short and blunt. This is one of the select few finest American literary works of the twentieth century. If you have any interest in Hemingway's writing, this novel is a must-read.

A good, quick read
The great American novelist doesn't disappoint.

Jake, a likable but disabled incarnation of a rather classic Hemingway character, struggles as an impotent in a love square for the affections of the quasi-royal Lady Ashley.

Set primarily in Spain during Fiesta, Hemingway's portrayal of decadence, overconsumption, and the breakdown of Judeo-Christian values in post-WWI Europe makes for a hard to put down story. And unlike some of Hemingway's other works, it doesn't leave the reader feeling like hell at the end.

I was once in love with Catherine
I was eleven years old when I fell in love with Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls and first became a fan of Ernest Hemingway. In reading most of his works, is it any wonder that those of us of a certain age became so enamored with his style that we aped his every trick? The man was a stylist of the highest order, and no other writer comes close to him for clarity and precision.

Naturally, over long lifetimes most readers move on from those who first turned them on to the beauty and grace of fiction and find other authors who touch their hearts deeply. Moving back and forth in time and across cultures we expand our tastes and experiences. But to test ourselves, from time to time we go back to our shelves and dust off an old favorite to see how the book and its author stand up to the comparisons.

So I hauled down A Farewell to Arms and began reading. Within a minute I was hooked; the old master's style still placed an unbreakable stranglehold on me and I was unable to cease until the story played out. The sentences are still simple and direct, and what is left out is as important as what is retained. Ernest Hemingway lives every time he is pulled from the shelves or stacks.

The story of `Farewell' is as powerful as ever; the folly of war; the stupidity of those who manage it; and the impact on the lives who are caught up in it. Hemingway has lost none of his hard hitting story telling ability after the passage of nearly a century.

But something has changed, I am no longer that eleven year old in love with my dear Ingrid, and I'm not the adolescent in love with the beautiful Catherine Barkley. Could there be a more romantic name than Catherine Barkley? While Ernest is still a vital force in writing, his notion of women has become archaic.

The book still inspires revulsion of war, but I no longer was in love with Cat. She was old fashioned and dependent on Tenente Henry for love and emotional support. Instead of being born at the end of the nineteenth century, she could have been the heroin on a Walter Scott novel two hundred years earlier, although I must admit she was a bit more adventuresome.

I still look forward to my next foray back into the works of Hemingway, but I think that I may never fall in love with his leading ladies again. I'm no longer the eager young romantic rowing away from war with my love. How sad for me.

Read Hemingway. He's still got more talent and power than ninety-nine percent of those who put words on paper, and A Farewell to Arms is a wonderful example of his style and power.