Revitalized Reading Podcast
Revitalized Reading Podcast
Book Review: A Farwell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Ep.17)
Are you looking for a good classic novel to read with the onset of Spring? 'A Farwell to Arms' might be that book! If you're interested in reading it, or have read it already, I hope you enjoy the review.
(There is a really weird audio error at around the 40-45 second mark, for the life of me I couldn't fix it, sorry about that everyone!)
Skip to 12:35 to avoid spoilers after 5:35!!!
Works Cited:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Farewell_to_Arms#Background_and_publication_history
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10799.A_Farewell_to_Arms
- https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1954/hemingway/biographical/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway
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Music: On Hold for You by Kevin MacLeod | https://incompetech.com/
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Hello everyone, this is your host Josh, welcome to the Revitalized Reading Podcast. I apologize for the postponement of this episode, I had been traveling, got sick while traveling, and generally just felt unmotivated and garbage. But those dark days are no more! I hope you enjoy my review of the first book in Season 2, ‘A Farewell to Arms’ by Ernerst Hemingway.
The edition that I read and will be using for this review is the Hemingway Library edition of ‘A Farewell to Arms’. This particular edition was released in 2012, and is 284 pages. There is an additional 50 pages covering Hemingway’s alternate endings of the book, which is pretty cool.
As always, I want to give you some information regarding the books history, and the context surrounding its writing and publication. ‘A Farewell to Arms’ is set in the Italian Campaign during WW1. The book is a result of, and heavily inspired by Hemingway’s own experiences serving as an ambulance driver for the Italian Army during the war. Most of the named characters in the book were based on real people Hemingway knew from that timeframe. The book was published in 1929, 11 years after the end of World War 1, Hemingway was 30 years old.
Speaking of our man Ernest, let me tell you a little more about his life. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park Illinois. Born to relatively affluent parents, Ernest would enjoy a comfortable childhood. Between his numerous athletic and academic endeavors in High School, Ernest took an interest in Journalism.
In December 1917, 8 months after the United States joined WW1, Ernest tried to join the U.S. Army, but was rejected because of his eyesight. Initially dejected and fearful of missing his chance to participate in the Great War, he found a Red Cross recruitment paper advertising the need for ambulance drivers in the Italian Campaign. He enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity. Only a month or so into his service, he was severely wounded by a Mortar shell. The wound would hospitalize him for months, but allowed him to meet and fall in love with Agnes Von Kurowsky, and American nurse who tended to his injuries. She would be the inspiration for one of the main characters in the novel. Sadly, he would not be able to secure a relationship with Nurse Kurowsky. Hemingway’s experiences in Italy during the war would leave a lasting impact on his life and legacy.
After the war, Hemingway would pursue his journalism career across the world. He would return to the battlefield in some of the worlds largest conflicts in the 20th century, this time as a war correspondent. Hemingway published his first book ‘Three Stories and Ten Poems’ in 1923. His most popular and well regarded books are ‘The Sun Also Rises’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ which he would win a Nobel Peace Prize for, and of course, ‘A Farewell to Arms’.
Hemingway enjoyed a successful career as a writer and journalist, but this success didn’t translate to the happiness and fulfillment Hemingway was hoping for. Having been divorced three times, and having a less than ideal or close relationship with any of his three children, Ernest would struggle with mental health for the remainder of his life, culminating in his suicide in his Ketchum Idaho home on July 2nd 1961. He was 61 years old. He is survived by his son Patrick, who is approaching his 95th birthday at the time of this episode.
I was only able to cover a fraction of Hemingway’s life and accomplishments, so if you want to learn more about him and his incredible life, I’ll link some sources in the episode description you can check out.
I now want to give you a brief introduction to 6 of the main, or prominent characters in the book. The Main Character of the book, is Lieutenant Frederic Henry. An American who volunteered before the United States joined the war, serves as an officer with the Italian Army’s Ambulance corps. A rather serious and thoughtful man, his experiences change much of how he looks at life,and death. He is essentially Ernest Hemingway himself, with a few differences.
Nurse Catherine Barkley is our next major character. Her role as a volunteer English Nurse for the Red Cross is how she will cross paths with Lieutenant Henry. She will become the love interest of Lieutenant Henry, and the focus of the book as time progresses. Her character is inspired by Agnes Von Kurowsky.
Our first supporting character is Lieutenant Rinaldi. Rinaldi is an enthusiastic and spirited Italian officer alongside Lieutenant Henry. The two share a friendship of sorts, and experience the struggles and tragedies of war together.
The next supporting character is the Priest. A Priest who is assigned to the same unit as Rinaldi and Henry is the usual culprit for starting deep conversations about the war and God. While Rinaldi acts as the comic relief for the trio, the Priest is the serious and thoughtful one.
Another character we see throughout the book is Helen Ferguson. A Nurse who works with and is friendly too Catherine. She is present throughout much of the books more important and interesting moments, but she doesn’t speak or get involved all that often.
Our final character is Miss Van Campen. Another nurse who works with Helen and Catherine, she is intense and rather sharp. Her and Henry dislike each other from their first meeting, making for some awkward and tense situation later.
Alright everyone, now that I’ve introduced you to some of the characters, it is time for me to share the Books plot summary. We are entering heavy spoiler territory, so if you don’t want to hear spoilers, I put a timestamp in the description you can skip ahead to. Let’s dive right in!
‘A Farewell to Arms is broken up into 5 books or parts, so I’ll breakdown each Part to make it a little easier to follow where we are at in the story. Book 1 begins in the early months of 1917. A cholera epidemic has swept through the Italian Army, killing Thousands. Strained from the constant work, Lieutenant Henry, stops to rest at Gorizia. There he talks with Lieutenant Rinaldi and the Priest. Rinaldi tells Henry he has fallen in love, maybe, with an English nurse, intrigued by this development, and wanting to get away from the front, Henry follows Rinaldi to the hospital, and introduces Henry to the Nurse, Catherine Barkley. The two talk for a bit while Rinaldi attends to other business, Catherine shares that her fiancé, a British soldier was killed recently at the Somme in the Western Front. After a short while, Henry tries to kiss her, but is swiftly slapped. Catherine apologizes, and the two share a kiss afterwards. Henry and others return to the front, and in a matter of hours, Henry and one of his fellow soldiers Passini, are hit with the shrapnel of a Mortar round. Henry is wounded severely in the knee, but watches as Passini dies.
Rinaldi visits Henry in the hospital, and commends him on his heroic action of helping other wounded soldiers when he was wounded himself. Henry flatly denies he did anything heroic. Changing the subject, Rinaldi tells Henry he will be transferred to a hospital away from the front in Milan to get surgery on his knee. He is visited by the Priest, and they talk about the entry of America into the war, and the relatively perilous situation the Italian Army is in. After a few days of being in Milan, Catherine arrives at the hospital after Henry’s request to Rinaldi that she be transferred to him. Upon meeting again, Henry feels suddenly and powerfully that he is in love with her. The two grow an intimate relationship with one another while he recovers, and gets a successful surgery on his knee. Nearing the end of his recovery, Henry is found to be jaundiced. Miss Van Campen soon discovers empty liquor bottles by his bed, and realizes he is drinking so heavily to avoid the front. Reporting this to the Army, his 3 week convalescence leave is cancelled, and he is sent back to the front. Before he leaves for the front, Catherine tells Henry she is three months pregnant. Oh boy haha.
Book 3. Henry returns to Gorizia, and reunites with Rinaldi and the Priest. They talk about his leg, and then about Catherine, disappointed the two haven’t married yet. The Priest makes a comment that he predicts the war will end soon, citing a general fatigue between both the Italians and Austro-Hungarians. A few days later, Henry and his unit learn that a joint German and Austro-Hungarian Army have broken through the defensive lines at Caporetto. A large scale retreat from Gorizia begins. While stuck in the retreats traffic, Henry is afraid of artillery or aerial attack on the exposed road, so him and a few others try to take an alternate path. Some of the soldiers try to desert, but Henry shoots and kills one of them. A few others get lost, or are killed in tragic friendly fire incidents. Eventually Henry and another soldier are able to reach Italian lines, but something seems wrong. Henry notices all of the Officers being interrogated for the failure to hold the enemy, he overhears that the punishment is death. Taking his opportunity, he jumps into a nearby river, and escapes. Cold, wet, and hungry, he is able to get on a train headed to Milan, desperately hoping to see Catherine soon.
Once reaching Milan, he finds that Catherine has left for Stresa. He goes to see Ralph, an opera singer he met months earlier, and asks how to successfully cross into Switzerland, a neutral country untouched by the war, and away from Italian authorities. Henry travels to Stresa, now wearing civilian clothes. He finds Catherine and Helen, and they reunite. Confused as to why he is back so soon, Henry limits what he shares with Catherine, all while feeling guilty that he is now a criminal for desertion, he isn’t guilty for running away, but he’s guilty for what it will do to him and Catherine. The two travel to a nearby hotel, and prepare for their escape to Switzerland. In the night, Henry is alerted by the hotels bartender Emilio, that the Italian authorities will arrive in the morning to arrest him. Despite an intense storm, and miles of Lake Maggiore to cross, Henry decides that him and Catherine should leave immediately. After a long, wet, and difficult journey across the lake to get to the Swiss side, they are processed at the border and are allowed passage because they claimed to be a married couple hoping to get involved in the countries winter sports. I feel like you wouldn’t be able to pull that off nowadays, but I give them a 10/10 for coming up with that story.
With the beginning of Book 5, Henry and Catherine move initially to the skiing town of Montreux, but then later move to Lausanne to be closer to a hospital due to Catherines concerns with pregnancy and childbirth. Their life is relatively peaceful and enjoyable, completely removed from the horrors of war and death. One night, Catherine goes into Labor, so the two make their way to the hospital. Initially all goes well with the birth, Catherine is stable and it seems that all is normal. Henry goes to see the baby, a boy, and discovers it was stillborn. Initially he feels detached, almost unaffected by the sight of his lifeless son, and then the doctor calls to him. Catherine begins to hemorrhage, nothing can be done. Henry goes to her side, they exchange a few last words, and she dies in his arms. Numb, and empty, he walks back to the hotel in the pouring rain. The same kind of rain when he met Catherine, the same kind of rain he saw during the retreat from Gorizia, and the same kind of rain when they thought they had left death and war behind in Italy.
The main themes of the book are initially subtle, but as the book progresses the subtleness goes away. So what are ‘A Farewell to Arms’ main themes? The first, and most prominent theme is the destructive effects of war, and the second main theme is the fragility of human life. This book is anti-war, 100%, but its approach is much more unique. Rather than dwell on the constant death and horror of war at the frontlines, the book explores how war permeates and poisons entire countries with sadness, hopelessness, and death. Not just physical death, but mental and spiritual death. The book also explores how fragile human life really is, how quickly, tragically, and unceremoniously it can end.
The book was received favorably immediately after its publication. The book was particularly popular with WW1 veterans, and others who lived through those difficult years. While obtaining mostly praise, the book also received criticism for its supposed promotion of sexual relations before marriage and general sexual content, even though Hemingway never once approved of premarital sex, and intentionally kept the sexual relations between Henry and Catherine implied, rather than detailed in the book. Despite the controversy, ‘A Farewell to Arms’ is read and studied throughout schools and universities all across the United States, and is considered an American Classic.
As is tradition with the podcast, I’ll share with you 3 different quotes that I really enjoyed or thought were interesting from the book, I’ll cite the page number for each quote if you want to find them yourself. The first quote I’ll be sharing can be found on page 55. “They want to get you the Medaglia d’argento but perhaps they can get only the bronze. What for? Because you are gravely wounded. They say if you can prove you did any heroic act you can get the silver. Otherwise it will be the bronze. Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act? No, I said. I was blown up while we were eating cheese.” If you laughed, that’s okay, I did too. I think the power in this passage comes from Henry’s complete understanding that he did nothing in his mind to earn a medal, even though the Italian Army is obsessed with handing them out. It’s the dark, but comical aspect of this that hammers home just how sudden and nondiscriminatory death and destruction really was.
The next quote is on page 161. It reads, “We won’t talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain. I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression ‘in vain’. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” While rather long, this passage was another powerful look into not just Hemingway’s mind, but an entire generation, the Lost Generation that had to endure World War 1. This somber and almost defeatist viewpoint was often a result of any long term exposure to the seemingly useless nature of that war.
The final quote I’ll be sharing with you is on page 216, it says,”If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” This quote is the perfect encapsulation of the novels theme. Life is fragile, and death comes for us all, but death seems to have a particular attraction to the good and beautiful souls of the world. If that wasn’t foreshadowing I don’t know what is.
It is now time for me to give my scores for the book, I’ll start off with comprehension. This book was really pretty easy to understand and keep up with, it earns a 10/10 in my book for comprehension. As for engagement, I give the book a 9/10. The story keeps you interested and invested for much of the book, the book’s first 30 or 40 pages are pretty slow, at least to me. It might not be a perfect 10/10, but 9/10 is not bad at all.
How does a ‘A Farwell to Arms’ look as far as the G-R rating? I had to think about this one for a little bit, but I think its PG-13. There is implied sex, there is of course violence and death, although I will say it isn’t graphic, but that’s it. This is on the milder scale of PG-13 in my opinion, but as always, its up to you what you think is best for you or children to read.
Now it’s time for reader reviews. For those of you who listened to the Season 2 intro episode, you’ll know I’m rolling out a new method to get reader reviews. Previously I used Amazon reviews, but from now on I’ll be using Goodreads, so I’m very excited to kick this off. I will show the highest rated review from each star rating, there are five, and I’ll start from the 1 star review on up. So without further delay, here is our 1 star review from Becky, I’m not joking her profile name is Becky. “Once, there was a time when I would have struggled through this one, convinced that since it was a "classic", there must be some redeeming quality to it. I'd have struggled to the bitter end, hating it more and more, and I'd have been disappointed by it even if there was something worthwhile at the end. Because getting there was tedious, boring, painful, and annoying.
This book has a lot of very varied reviews and opinions. Lots of people loved it, lots of people hated it. I can see why. It's a book that some people will definitely like. Masculinity, heavy drinking, etc will naturally appeal to some more than others. The love story aspect will appeal to some that aren't so much into the other stuff, and the war stuff will do for still more, maybe. Usually, the war and the masculinity and stuff would be my thing - but this just didn't do anything for me.
I think that this was due to the writing, and the reading. I didn't like the reader at all. He had a kind of clipped reading style, and since the writing was full of short sentences, it made it hard for me to settle into the reading and listen. A good reader needs a quality that draws a listener in - but this one did just the opposite. I struggled on through about 3 discs and I just could not stand the reader enough to get into the story. And the story wasn't doing much to help. Staccato sentences, back and forth. Lots of pointless dialogue that, I suppose, in the end would have painted a full picture and come together, but I just found myself not caring at all.
And this featured my very least favorite writing trick ever: using dialogue to replace explaining action...
"Here drink this. No all of it. It will do you good!"
"I don't want it. Put it on the table."
"Here - you drink it all up! There's a good boy. You'll see. It'll do you good like I say. No, sit down. Listen to me now."
"Answer the door, I think it's unimportant person number 4 coming to tell us something unimportant. What's he saying?"
"Go sit back down, I'll tell you everything in a minute. Here, drink more of this. Good."
The romance aspects, what little I saw, were just as abrasive and annoying.
"Oh, I love you! Do you love me? Say you love me."
"Yes I love you."
"Oh, you're just saying that! It's the war. You don't mean it."
"Yes, I do."
"No, you don't"
"Yes, really."
"Ok, sure. Because I love you, but you don't have to lie to me."
BLAH! Shut up. Who cares?! I just struggled along, in this three-against-one uphill battle... And they won. I raised my white flag and gave up. No mas, por favor.”
Here is our 2 star review by Meg Sherman, she says. “I feel like awarding the great Hemingway only two stars has officially consigned me to the seventh circle of literary hell. But I must be honest. By this website's criteria two stars indicates that a book is "okay" - and to me that describes this work perfectly.
Hemingway himself is undeniably gifted. I love his succinct style (though at times it degenerates to downright caveman-speak), his honest diction and his wonderful sense of humor. That being said, he gets away with utterly ignoring most rules of writing - which I admire at times, but let's face it, some of those rules are there for a REASON. This book is overflowing with extreme run-on sentences, constant use of qualifiers (I think "very" might actually be his VERY favorite word), adjectives (even NOUNS!) used four or five times in the same paragraph, and long stretches of dialogue involving more than two speakers with absolutely no indication of who is saying what (if I hadn't been reading a library book, I would have color-coded the darn thing!) And besides style, the story itself just didn't grab me. I didn't give two farts about the self-absorbed, unthinking, unfeeling protagonist or his codependent, psychologically damaged doormat of a girlfriend. This is NOT a love story. In fact, I feel sorry for anyone who thinks it is. Men who hate women are incapable of writing love stories. And for the life of me, I can't derive a theme - or even a general POINT - to this book... unless mayhap it is "stupid, senseless tragedy happens sometimes to people you don't care about." I did feel like crying several times while reading, though... but only because of the mention of alcohol on almost every page of text... I could literally HEAR Hemingway drinking himself to death. It broke my heart.”
Our three star review is from Matt. “I just finished it, and I'm disappointed. And not only disappointed; I'm also bothered by it. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at Hemingway's one-dimensional, sexist portrayal of Catherine Barkley, having read much of his other work, but somehow I still am. Put simply, Catherine is a ridiculous figure, and it's no fault of her own. Hemingway gives her no opportunity to sound like anything more than a half-crazy, desperate, fawning caricature with no real desires or opinions of her own. How many times must I read lines like, "I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you?" issue from her lips? Does Hemingway believe women think and talk like this, or does he mean to make his female characters sound like would-be wife-pets?
(I just read a review below that describes Henry and Catherine's dialogue as 'incantations,' the point being that the two, especially Catherine, are trying to will themselves to be happy despite an over-whelming sense of despair. It's an interesting point,and definitely makes reading the scenes with the two of them more palatable. But as much as I'd like to think that that was what Hemingway was going for, I don't know...)
As for the rest of the book, I suppose an argument could be made for its "ground-breaking" sexual frankness or for the necessarily graphic depictions of the front, and I'll buy that. There are, after all, a number of great moments. Still, it's hard to accept the canonization this book as THE central WWI novel and ignore the fact that one of its main characters is very poorly written, perhaps intentionally so.”
This 4 star review is brought to you by Ben, he said, “I'm not a Hemingway guy. I yearn for internal dialogue, various and ladened spiritual questioning, and deep psychology in my characters. I prefer writing that is smooth and philosophical. Hemingway gives me little of this.
But the settings of this book were beautiful, and the dialogue between characters, poignant. By the end, I found that Hemingway had craftily fucked with me to the point of my complete immersion into the novel.
It made me cry.”
The 5 star review is from Jason Pettus. “So let me embarrassingly admit that this is actually the very first book by Hemingway I've ever read, and that I was hesitant going into it because of just the overwhelming amount of bad stuff that's been said about him over the decades; to be truthful, I was half-expecting a parody of Hemingway at this point, all little words and nonsensical sentences and dudes treating girls kinda like crap most of the time. And yes, the book does for sure contain a certain amount of all this; but I was surprised, to tell you the truth, by how how tight, illuminating, fascinating and just plain funny A Farewell to Arms turned out to actually be. Wait, funny, you say? Sure; I dare you not to laugh, for example, during the scene when a huge argument breaks out between two Swiss border guards over which of their two hometowns boasts better winter sports. ("Ah, you see? He does not even know what a luge is!") This is what makes it such an intriguing novel about war, after all, because Hemingway expertly shows just how many surreal moments there are during times of war as well, that "war" doesn't just mean the two lines of soldiers facing each other at the front but also an entire region, an entire industry, an entire population. Hemingway's World War I is not just seen from the smeared windshield of a battlefront ambulance, but from bored soldiers getting drunk in a quiet bunker, from weary villagers hoping there will be at least something left of their homes after the war is over, from armchair pundits recovering in crumbling veteran hospitals, arguing over which complicated international treaty sunk them all and which is going to save them. It's an expansive, multi-facted, sometimes highly unique look at a wartime environment, one that at least here in his early career (he published this when he was 30) belies all the complaints that have ever been made about his hackneyed personal style.
And as far as that love story in the middle of it all, and the repeated complaints about Hemingway's characters all being misogynists...well, maybe it was just me, but I found his Catherine Barkley to be the very model of a modern independent woman (or at least modern and independent in 1920s terms), a fiercely intelligent and cynical creature who expects the same from her lovers, even while realizing that such a man is destined to either die in the environment they're currently in, or survive just to become a bitter, angry a--hole later in life. The way I see it, Catherine is simply trying to make the best of a bad situation; she needs love and intimacy in her life as much as anyone else, and especially in her role as a risk-taking, thick-skinned nurse just a few miles from the battle's front, but also understands that Tenente is destined to befall one of the two fates just mentioned, thus explaining the curious push/pull emotions she has towards him and the way she treats him throughout the novel. It's a surprisingly sophisticated relationship at work, the same thing that can be said of the novel in general; I don't know about the rest of Hemingway's work (yet, anyway), but at least A Farewell to Arms turned out to be a surprisingly cracking read, not only a definite classic but just an all-around amazing book in general. It comes highly recommended today.
Is it a classic? Yes”
‘A Farewell to Arms holds a 3.81 stars on Goodreads out of nearly 13,000 reviews. Moving on from reader reviews, here are three modern reviews by critics. The first is courtesy of the Washington Times, “A Farewell to Arms Stands, more than eighty years after its first appearance, as a towering ornament of American Literature.” The next review is from NPR.org, “A Farewell to arms is a gem. To see Hemingway go from bold pronouncements and overwriting to his signature stripped down style isn’t just instructive, its practically intrusive, but fun.” The final critic review is by the New York Times. “Fascinating. Serves as an architect of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an authors process.”
So now its time for me to give the novel an overall score. I had to think about this over the past few days, but I’m pretty comfortable giving the book a 7.5 out of 10. Final thoughts.
Thank you for joining me today, I hope as always that you enjoyed the review, and came away with enough information to decide whether or not you want to pick up the book yourself. This won’t be the end of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ this season however, as I’ll be reviewing the 1957 film of the same name, and potentially doing an interview with ‘A Farwell to Arms’ Superfan, so join the podcasts social media pages linked below if you want to stay updated with that. In about a week and a half, I’ll be releasing another review, covering John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, so I hope to see you then. In the meantime, stay safe, and as always keep reading, thanks everyone.
