This (For Whom the Bell Tolls) was my second Hemingway book (read A Farewell to Arms last year and liked it too). His books have a very definite style. These first two were very much about men, but the men both had women they deeply loved.
I found A Farewell to Arms to be a bit choppy around the middle, but it is set during a war and war is muddled. Actually For Whom the Bell Tolls is set during war too. And it is much cleaner, more straight forward in its telling.
Here is The Big Read's Audio Radio show on Farewell to Arms.
That (above) was the grand total of my notes on Farewell (and apparently For Whom the Bell Tolls also) the first time I read it.
I read Farewell again last month.
If you are wondering why I reread Farewell, two reasons:
1. I have always wondered if I didn't like it simply because it was my first Hemingway and I didn't have my Hemingway chops (I have loved the Hemingway books I have read subsequently.)
2. I read All Quiet on the Western Front (also WWI) and wanted to compare.
On Farewell, Wiki notes:
A Farewell to Arms is a novel written by Ernest Hemingway set during the Italian campaign of World War I. The book, published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant ("Tenente") in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The title is taken from a poem by 16th-century English dramatist George Peele.
A Farewell to Arms focuses on a romance between Henry and a British nurse, Catherine Barkley, against the backdrop of World War I, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of this, Hemingway's bleakest novel, cemented his stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier American war novel from that debacle [World War I]".
The novel was first adapted to film in 1932, with further versions in the following decades.
Even though there was dirt and shrapnel and wounds and fear and displacement in Farewell, it is not the same level of war as All Quiet.
Farewell sort of reads as the Country Club version of war when compared to All Quiet.
My husband has read both of these books also. He commented Farewell reads like the Hollywood version of war. And All Quiet reads like real war.
Part of this is the fact that the main character in Farewell was sleeping in a bed and being fed and drinking (a lot) of alcohol during his version of the war. The main character in All Quiet was living in a trench (with dead bodies) and was pretty hungry.
These differences were probably due to the two different sides of the war represented AND the different rank/level of the two main characters.
And part of it is Hemingway's writing style.
There is The Iceberg Theory of Hemingway's writing:
Hemingway:
"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."
and Wiki:
From reading Rudyard Kipling he absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take. Of the concept of omission, Hemingway wrote in "The Art of the Short Story": "You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood." By making invisible the structure of the story, he believed the author strengthened the piece of fiction and that the "quality of a piece could be judged by the quality of the material the author eliminated." His style added to the aesthetic: using "declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world" with simple and plain language, Hemingway became "the most influential prose stylist in the twentieth century" according to biographer Meyers.
So, what did I think of Farewell to Arms, this second time through, on its own merit (not comparing to All Quiet on the Western Front)?
My impression, reading it the first time, a while back, was indeed because I was not used to Hemingway.
I loved For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, Old Man and the Sea when I went on to read each of them (after my first reading of Farewell).
And on the second reading, I loved Farewell too.
My favorite of the grouping is For Whom the Bell Tolls. That one is about the Spanish Civil War. No, I am not fond of war, but it is a truly great book. My second favorite, The Sun also Rises, is about bull fights and drinking and carousing. As I said at the time - who would have guessed I would have loved that book - ?
I am very much a Hemingway girl.
I never would have known this if Hemingway books had not kept showing up on my to read lists. I would not have read the first one and then gone on to read the following three, on my own. I would not have understood that I needed to get my Hemingway Chops and learn how to read his style.
