A Farewell to Arms book club review

Sam

Sadly, I gave up on 'A Farewell to Arms'. I stopped and restarted it many times but just couldn't get in to it. I felt there was little explanation for the modern reader about why the narrator was off to Italy or why an American was in the Italian army.

 

Maybe if I'd read on, I would have found out but I found the pacing of the writing difficult to deal with. Paragraphs and paragraphs of text describing a single drive where little happens and then months, weeks, days passing in a line or two.

 

I didn't feel familiar enough or enamoured with the characters enough to deal with a narrative which for me, just didn't seem to flow and I often found myself skimming pages. 

I wish I could have got in to this book further. I've read the last couple of chapters and they seem very readable but I just couldn't get to grips with this book at the beginning, my attention waned again and again which is a shame as I suspect the later parts were much stronger!

 

Defeated by a farewell to arms, I'm moving on to 'a husbands secret' which I'm really looking forward to reading.

 

Nick

I think this was one of Hemingway’s early novels and I found it dull.  I found the biggest issue  I had with this book was the writing style , for example, there  is a line in the book that reads, “…he looks very dead...” and, the dialogue between Fred and Catherine was not realistic-  I was frustrated because no-one talks like that in conversation with another person. 

I found the book dull with the repetition of the same words used over again from one paragraph to another. In comparison to the strong characters in John Steinbeck’s novels, Catherine and Frederic did not have a ‘face’.  

 

The book would have been better as a memoir based on Hemingway’s experience in the army.  I think it confirms that a ‘classic’ does not mean it’s very good; Perhaps it was Hemingway’s first novel.

   I read The old man and the sea before I read this book, and I enjoyed it.

 Margaret

I didn’t really enjoy reading the book.  I found the beginning of the book and the description of nature in the first pages of the book enjoyable and interesting.  

 I did read the book to the end but there were parts of the book that I skim read and I did lose interest in the book.

 Anne

It makes you wonder why it is considered a classic…  I did not enjoy the book.   

Perhaps Hemingway’s short stories read better and Hemingway is a better writer of the short story.

Silja

I was very disappointed in the book and found the style of writing stilted. 

 I am reading The Dangerous Summer, a travelogue, non-fiction book written by Hemingway and in contrast to A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway gives an account of Pamplona and running with the bulls and bull fighting by using descriptive, emotional language, that conveys the danger of the events in the book and the strong emotions and this style of writing is good.  

 In The Dangerous Summer, Hemingway describes things beautifully but not so in A Farewell to Arms-  I wonder if Hemingway as an American writer was good in his day but not now. 

 

I am enjoying The Dangerous Summer and I would read another book by Hemingway, perhaps, Death in the afternoon.

 

 

Sharon C.

I was initially excited to be reading a classic novel and one written by Hemingway but was disappointed. 

The dialogue reminded me of a teenage diary.  It was stilted and I agree with Nick, it sounded like a dialogue from a 1940’s film.  The book did not create characters that you could root for and I thought it badly written and questioned the book being classed as a classic.

Hemingway obviously used his experience of fighting in a war in the book and the book could have been more exciting because of his experience.

I would describe the book as ‘a Sunday punt on the Thames’.