Adios A Las Armas

Excelente obra muy triste la maestría del escritor se adviere

This is a classic 3-star book for me... 'liked it pretty well but had reservations.' In other words, clearly on the "meh" side.This is my second strike for Hemingway. The book ?missed? for me because, although the plot and structure were fine, he failed to convince me of the love between Lt. Henry and Nurse Barkley. The shallow dialogue was painful to read and contributed to the single dimension of the characters.I think where Hem shines is in his depiction of WWI from the Italian point of view. I truly enjoyed the scenes where Lt. Henry is wounded and the section of the book that conveyed the chaos and confusion of the Italian retreat. It was easy to see why Lt. Henry became disillusioned with this war. I just wish Hemingway had been able to tell us why he was in the war to begin with. Speaking Italian is not a very good reason to join a war!I?ve always heard that one either loves or hates Hemingway. I disagree. I feel almost completely neutral about him. I think he did a great job in this book portraying an anti-war attitude with quotes like this:...?They (the Italians) were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is."There is quite a bit of good writing in this book; unfortunately, there is much tedious writing combined with a bland ?love? story. Take away the dull dialogue, the ubiquitous drinking, and the melodramatic ending, and this book would have ended up as a well-written novella about war that I would be raving about.

I love this guy and the war and the struggles going through his head. It makes it all worth reading, especially since I love the History Channel. My dad lived through a lot of these struggles during WW2, so I connect in a personal way that many might not. I'm the end of the Baby Boomers, born to parents nearly forty.

Frederic Henry’s memoir of the days he fell in love during his foray into WWI at the front in Italy as an ambulance driver. He is coping with loss and writing out his struggles. It is raining and we are tired but you know now. I will move on.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then write reports on whether or not they deserve the labelBook #17: A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway (1929)The story in a nutshell:Published in the late 1920s, right when Modernism was first starting to become a commercially successful form of the arts, A Farewell to Arms is Ernest Hemingway's wry and cynical look at World War I, the event that most defined not only his generation but also the beginning of the Modernist movement. Semi-autobiographical in nature, the book tells the story of Frederic Henry, known to most as "Tenente" (Italian slang for "Lieutenant"), a young and gung-ho American who couldn't get accepted by the American military during the war, so volunteered to be an ambulance driver for the Italian army instead. One of the first of Hemingway's tales to define the stoic "man's man" he would eventually become known for, the novel basically follows Tenente through a series of thrilling escapades, made even more interesting because of the main character not seeing them as thrilling at all -- nearly having his leg torn off while at the front, saving a man's life, escaping execution by diving off a bridge, a rowboat ride to Switzerland in the middle of the night while fleeing a group of pursuers, and a whole lot more.Like I said, though, Hemingway's point here is not to glamorize war, but rather to highlight the mundane aspects of it all; the endless red tape, the weasely things people do to get out of actual work, the BS conversations that are always taking place among soldiers, all of them arguing over how the war is going but none of them actually possessing any factual information. At the same time, though, A Farewell to Arms is about the monstrous developments of World War I in particular, the very first large war to be fought during the Industrial Age, and therefore capable of inflicting so much more carnage than anyone thought possible. (For example, the brand-new European railway system is heavily featured throughout the book, and especially the fact that in a half-day's ride, you could go literally from the battlefront to a five-star luxury hotel, something that had never been possible before WWI.) Oh, and if all this wasn't enough, Hemingway throws in a love story too, a complicated one featuring a complicated woman, one that has been a source of heated interpretation since the book first came out 79 years ago.The argument for it being a classic:There seems to be two main arguments for this being a classic, one based on the author and one on the book itself. Because the fact is that Hemingway is considered by many to be one of the most important novelists in the history of that format, a fabled "High Priest of Modernism" who taught all of us to think in a punchier, shorter way, and with this mostly being for the better for the arts in general. Because let's not forget, a mere twenty or thirty years before this book was first published, it was actually the flowery and overwritten Victorian style of literature that dominated the publishing industry; and as we've all learned throughout the course of this "CCLaP 100" essay series, although Victorian literature certainly has its charms and inherent strengths, it's also a whole lot of talking to say not much at all, a situation that was starting to drive artists crazy by the time the 20th century got into swing. Hemingway, fans claim, was the first Modernist to really bring all the details together in a profoundly great way -- the first to combine the exciting rat-a-tat style of pulp-fiction writers with the weighty subjects of the academic community, producing work that owes as much to Raymond Chandler as it does to Virginia Woolf but is ultimately much better than simply reading those two authors back-to-back. And by making its subject World War I, fans say, Hemingway here turns in yet another great document of those times that the early Modernists were known for -- from The Great Gatsby to All Quiet Among the Western Front, it's hard for us to even think of the artists from the "Jazz Age" or "Lost Generation" or whatever you want to call it, without thinking of this globe-changing event that was so in the middle of it. There's a good reason, after all, that many consider A Farewell to Arms one of the greatest war novels of all time.The argument against:Of course, there are others who can't even hear the words "Ernest Hemingway" without automatically shuddering, again for a variety of reasons that even most of his fans admit hold at least some weight -- because he is overrated by the academic community, because his personal style is a hackneyed, easily parodied one, because his "man's man" shtick got real old real fast, because it's now inspired three generations of a--holes (and counting) to want to be bull-fleeing, cigar-smoking woman-haters too. At its heart, its critics say, A Farewell to Arms is an interesting-enough little ditty, mostly because Hemingway himself had some interesting little experiences during the war that he basically cribbed wholesale for the book; but then this story is covered with layer after layer of bad prose, macho posturing, and aimless meanderings that get you about as far away from a traditional three-act novel as you can possibly get. With Hemingway and his critics, it's never a case of "it's a good enough book but shouldn't be labeled a classic;" those who dislike him really dislike him, and wish to see his work removed from academic reading lists altogether. "classic" label or not.My verdict: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

Woof - what a depressing book in many ways. I had a love/hate relationship with this book while reading it. The writing style of short and to the point sentences was both appealing and frustrating. I felt that it made the characters a bit too one dimensional, but at the same time helped give a matter-of-factness to the war and the people living through it. I am glad I read this, my first Hemingway, and feel like I understand the point of the hopelessness of war and life of the time.

Depressing. Bleak, unemotional and unengaging. I found Hemingway's prose style annoying and his dialogue worse, and I didn't like his characters. On the other hand, I thought that the plot was well-constructed - I'd have been very surprised if it hadn't been - and that the the book did a good job of conveying the bleakness and uncertainty of war. I made it to the end, but it was a struggle at times.I'm aware, though, that I'm in a minority and many people love the very things that made me dislike the book. If you like terse prose and depressing war stories, you'll love this book.

Depressing. Bleak, unemotional and unengaging. I found Hemingway's prose style annoying and his dialogue worse, and I didn't like his characters. On the other hand, I thought that the plot was well-constructed - I'd have been very surprised if it hadn't been - and that the the book did a good job of conveying the bleakness and uncertainty of war. I made it to the end, but it was a struggle at times.I'm aware, though, that I'm in a minority and many people love the very things that made me dislike the book. If you like terse prose and depressing war stories, you'll love this book.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway; (4*)I found this to 'one' of Papa's best works. I know that it has been slandered and slammed but this reader appreciated the writing and the story lines.The characters incorporate the desperation of youth, the insanity and traumatization of war and the strategy of day to day living rather than striving for anything like achievement or satisfaction which is the effect of the madness of war upon the human soul. It is a profoundly sexual book. But it also presents a love story between two individuals that has more depth and sensuality than one would expect from Hemingway. In addition, insights into the behavior of the military, both the allies and the axis powers, are fascinating; marked by the idiocy of human beings caught in any dramatic effort. It is a war story that touches on the humans involved and the devastating effect of battle on the individual. It is a love story that ends in tragedy because it is a passion born of war not sincerity. It is a commentary on the madness of politics and the indulgence in mass slaughter in order to accomplish nothing. A very meaningful novel from an author in his prime.I DO recommend this one and found it to be a very satisfying read.

la narración me pareció pésima, y no deseo escribir 5 palabras más.

I really enjoyed the book. It moves through different emotions and seasons seamlessly even though there are dramatic shits in action. I found myself very involved with the characters which seemed distant.

No entiendo cómo pude durar tanto tiempo y no llegar a esta historia

excelente libro pésimo lector. nunca oí un audiolibro tan malo

Hemingways gaafste roman. Opvallend contrast tussen harde oorlogscenes en sweet talk tussen de geliefden. Hun relatie is onromantisch, maar toch zoet;

Es un gran libro narrativo, lo mantiene en vilo acerca de lo que va a pasar. Ese final es sorpresivo. Muy poco me imaginaba que acabaría de esta forma. La descripción de la guerra lo hace sentir vivo ahí en el frente

Sad story about war, death, and alcohol. Not the right kind of book for me.

Read in 2011 as part of Reading 1001 while still on Shelfari. The story is set during WWI as part of the Italian campaign. it is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The protagonist deserts from the army and in so doing is saying farewell to arms. His mistress dies and so there is the farewell of "loving arms". It blends two major themes; love and war.

Far be it for me to criticize Hemingway…I think I enjoy his stories so much because I am often so irritated by his writing style. But I keep reminding myself that ‘it is just a style’. At times it feel more like reportage (which shouldn’t be surprising). But it is easy to look past all this because, as much as I often don’t particularly empathize with the characters, I find myself invested in their story somehow!Don’t get me wrong; I had the ending pegged from the moment Henry met Catherine, and as soon as it began raining in the last chapter, on their way to the hospital, I recognized that not so subtil trope!There was only one loose end that I couldn’t work out, and that was about halfway through the book a nurse tells Henry that She’s his friend, to which he replies "I know". But she then responds ominously with something like "No you don’t. But you will!".I may have missed something. But I seem to have lost the thread of what this statement was leading up to.As I approached the end, I was expecting some sort of payoff which never came, or perhaps it did earlier and I missed the point.I never believed that Henry loved Cat. Not really.I also got the impression that Catherine needed someone to validate her life more than have genuine feelings for Henry himself.Perhaps that was the whole point. In war you take whatever you are given,I kept trying to imagine Henry and Cat living together, happily married with child. But it never felt real. Like the two of them were living in a dream, which most of the time is exactly how their dynamic Came across.That was actually where much of the tension arose for me. Like watching a train wreck in slow motion.I’ve got to say, contrary to how it sounds, I really did enjoy this book.Good, bad or indifferent, if you find yourself still contemplating the events of a story long after you have finished reading it, then I take that as a sign of a good book. As far as I am concerned, that is all that counts at the end of the day.

Excellent, clear and concise story about war and love.

As I mentioned in some of my previous reviews, I’ve had an unfortunate tendency towards “pop culture bluffing” for a large part of my life. I don’t have the attention span to keep abreast of everything that trends in pop culture, and when it comes to literature, it’s not always that much better.One of the authors that I’m the most ashamed to have bluffed about reading – until reading – is Ernest Hemingway. The man – for better or worse – is such a titan in 20th century literature, that he is understandably considered by many to be a quintessential part of a proper cultural upbringing – at least in the Western tradition.So when I came across this compact classic of his on a table with other paperback classics, I decided to go for it. Getting started was no big deal – the book was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine from May-October 1929, so the chapters are compact and quickly read – but then something happens that, upon reflection, happens way too much for me. I brought it along to read on a long public transport trip, and then misplaced it once I got home. This actually frustrated me quite a bit in this case, as I’d reached a very intense part of the story when it happened. After nearly 2 months, I found it at random in a shopping bag.As for the book itself, it’s intense. Elements of it are supposedly autobiographical – Hemingway served in the Italian campaigns during the Great War – but it’s not fully so. The character gallery is very vivid – you feel like you know these people, or know someone like them at the very least. Hemingway’s descriptions of scenery and settings are so visceral and vivid that you almost feel like you can smell the smoke from exploded ordnance mixed with soaked earth. It’s almost as if you are “there” – with a bit of imagination.The conclusion of it is a true gutwrencher, although if you are familiar with narrative devices from Western literature of the late 19th and early 20th century, you might be able to see it coming.

It feels a bit weird to be writing this sort of a review for a Hemingway but then again I have never subscribed to the belief that "classics" should be exempt from reader opinion.

Mild spoiler warning.

Anyway..

This book irritated and exasperated me.

Its apparently an anti war novel. I think its supposed to evoke feelings of revulsion or disgust against war. If that was its aim it totally failed. The writing was so bland, so repetitive, the dialogue was so stilted and awkward, I did not connect with any of the characters and frankly didn't really care about them.

This book can thematically be divided into four parts - first when the protagonist is near the front and interacts with his comrades, secondly when he is at a hospital injured, but has a great romance, thirdly when he is back at the front and caught in a retreat, and the fourth part when he escapes the war but things go badly anyway.

The first and second parts are incredibly bland and boring. While general description and narrative are still ok, the absurdist dialogue among soldiers just fell flat. Frankly I think Joseph Heller's Catch 22 did a far better job with this sort of theme. The romance was incredibly awkward and evoked no emotion whatsoever. Everything from action to dialogue just felt like two puppets going through the motions. The protagonists backstory and motivations are not fleshed out very well and this together with the wooden plot progression meant I had zero empathy for him. And I am not even sure if the romance counts as a romance. Is it romance if you get attached to a piece of furniture? Because the female love interest character has no personality that I could find.

The third part is the best part of the book. The retreat, the events, the actions actually felt more poignant and powerful than anything that had come before. This was the only section where I was not indifferent to the fate of the protagonist.

The fourth part went back to bland and boring and then had an incredibly predictable tacked on sad ending which I felt the author included simply because he had decided that this book could not end on a happy note. This is something that really really irritates me, when an author has an agenda and he pushes it artificially into the text so that it just looks and feels arbitrary and absurd. I knew it was coming and I was simply annoyed at the tackiness of the entire thing.

Overall a thoroughly unimpressive book which I would never ever recommend.

This book sure takes its time to get to full speed. The first two thirds of the book can be very unfocused, indistinguishable characters get pushed in the room, mumble a few words and continue on their way again. I wasn't sure what was going on on numerous occasions. The protagonist's love interest doesn't really strike me as a real person.

The last bit of the book is where Hemingway's sparing prose, which I have enjoyed in the past, really shines like I remember it, whereas before it was quite muddled. I suppose his dry wit is what kept me going and in the end Hemingway could do what he does best: take me away from the war into wintery isolation in Switzerland, caught in the middle yet strangely pacified, make me feel enclosed with the characters in their safe heaven to eventually just break my ribs by pounding me in the chest with a bleak, frosty icicle of an ending.

Great story, incredible imagery and absolutely horrible dialogue. The short, choppy sentences with constantly repeated words made the characters all sound like they had a third-grade education. I'm sure there was some deep literary technique here that I just missed, but it really hurt the book. It was saved only by the storyline.

A love story during war time. This story takes place during World War I an American driving ambulances for the Italians, meets an English nurse and love is in bloom. Once again for me , this is a classic that I do not know why it is. Maybe it is just me.

An interesting text illustrating how Hemingway transformed his inner emotions and memories into art. His prose has the feel of hand-rubbed oil-finished oak wood grain, and the more the reader knows about Hemingway's biography, the more interesting this book becomes as a crafted surface displaying the objective correlatives of his inner life. From his difficult childhood, to his experiences in WWI at the age of 19, and his immersion into a literal landscape of corpses and ideological pointlessness, there touched by a flame of romantic hope only to have it blown out, all of these elements combine in A Farewell to Arms. Beauty, the possibility of meaning, bombs blowing limbs off, any second your life could be over, a glimpse of hope and then “War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound.”

Set in Italy during WWI, the narrator of A Farewell to Arms is an American lieutenant serving with the Italian army as part of the ambulance corp (echoing Hemingway's own experience). On good terms with the Italian officers he is stationed with, his love affair with a local English nurse deepens when he is badly wounded by a shell, but once his convalescence is complete and he returns to the front he discovers that the summer has been a difficult one for his compatriots, and his war turns a very different corner.Given Hemingway's first-hand experience of what he was writing about, this book felt very powerful on many levels. Less about the experiences of being in the middle of the fighting on the front-line battlefield (although at one point it touches on it in a hugely impacting way), it is more about the myriad of war experiences of the men involved in the Italian front in the border mountains with Austria-Hungary, especially while they were waiting for the bigger offensives to take place. As the protagonist is wounded, we experience the juxtaposition of life in untouched Milan, where normality continues to a large extent, and the difficulty of then returning to a much changed war. The depictions of being part of a losing army that is being pushed back were deeply moving and engrossing, and Hemingway puts us front and centre in the middle of the confusions, heightened emotions and dangers that arose during the chaos of a major retreat.At its core, this book is the story of a love affair being conducted in the thick of the war. The protagonist's lover is very much a woman of that time, so if outdated depictions of a woman's raison d'être being to keep her man happy then perhaps this is not the book for you. However, if you take it for what it is - a fictional account of a war relationship from a very different era - it's a terrific read. His sentence style is a little bizarre at times (on occasions he jumps around topics between commas requiring some rereading to get the flow of the sentence properly), but the occasional choppiness in style somehow fits the tensions of the time where one couldn't afford to think too deeply and long-term about anything.Overall, I'm surprised and delighted by my first Hemingway. It was a fabulous page-turner, and I'll definitely be back for more.4.5 stars - one of the most authentic wider war experience books I've read to date.

My least favorite of Papa's major novels. It merits mention fo rbeing a conversation starter. I was reading this in a pub and was approached by a guy. He proved to be a nutter. I didn't know that then. He approached, pointed to my book and began rambling about how Hemingway and Hunter Thompson understood the essence of things (this was years before Thompson's suicide) and that their lives of excess were a just a relief for their clairty. That is my paraphrase. I wound up talking to the guy for hours and drinking a deal of beeer. I have seen him twice since then. He doesn't appear to remember me.

I see so many mixed reviews about Hemingway's novels. This was my second book by Hemingway that I have read and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it! It was by no means the perfect read but I really enjoyed the setting and the characters. There were a few times it got a little sluggish but for the most part I really liked this book.

I must admit that while I have been mesmerised by anything Hemingway for some time now, it was a bit of an effort to get through the first half of this book. While my attitude towards the book changed each time I got back into it, I think the source of the problem for me was the emptiness that can only be expressed by those who have first-hand experience of large-scale conventional war. Nonetheless, and despite the historical background to the story, I found it to be written clearly in the present tense. Yet I couldn’t help but sense the emptiness I had once felt when I was about seven years old. I remember visiting, for no particular reason, an old war widow, who gave me two shillings (five cent pieces - one for me and the other for my sister) but then she cried and pointed to the faded photographs of her husband and her brothers who were all killed in the Second World War. The empty feeling of the interior of her dark house with its art deco furniture and the smell of stale tobacco smoke accompanied me throughout “A Farewell to Arms” and I think I avoided it until I decided that I would finish it off in one go. As the climax emerged suddenly towards the end of the book, I was hooked and couldn’t put it down. By this stage of the plot the war was almost an afterthought for the main characters and bits of classic Hemingway emerge (beards, boxing, and booze). But by the end, I needed some quiet time to emotionally recover. I’ve never cried from reading a book before. I still don’t like this book. Nevertheless, it is truly magnificent and how somebody in their mid-twenties could comprehend so much beggars belief. It can only be genius.

This is, of course, a classic book. I'm not sure what writing was like before Hemmingway and his kind, but I found the writing difficult and strange. It got better as the book went on with lots of dialog, but it was still perhaps a product of its time, written in 1929. It is said that Earnest Hemmingway did much to change the style of prose and he won a Nobel Prize for literature. I found both the story and writing lacking, but I'm coming at that from many years past the time this was written and prose has changed a great deal. It's possible that Hemmingway's later works were different.

Classics are always worth reading, but don't expect this book to be like modern writing. The story was repetitious and if the dialog between the main character and his lady were all that happened, it's impossible they would ever get to know each other. It was crazy shallow and funny really. So was some of the dialog between the main character and his war buddies. Despite that, the author did somehow impart what was going on and how terrible war conditions were.