Great Book #48: A Farewell to Arms

I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I just knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died.I tried reading Hemingway in college, just the one short story, and it was so misogynistic that I swore I'd never bother with him again. His brief appearances in Marion Meade's Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin softened me up a bit, so I put this novel on my 100 great books list even though I still didn't want to read it. Then someone at the Common Good Books event asked if I'd ever read A Farewell to Arms (since, y'know, it's got the whole love-in-war thing going on). I told her I was allergic to Hemingway, and to my satisfaction everybody got a chuckle out of it.So imagine how taken aback I was to find that, apart from one annoying instance of the N-word, I actually liked this novel. People always praise his spare prose, and I get it now, I see the beauty in it.

I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weights on a doll's eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn't there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. I wiped my hand on my shirt and another floating light came very slowly down and I looked at my leg and was very afraid. Oh, God, I said, get me out of here.

Frederick Henry—an American ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War—is an unremarkable character, but I think that must be the point; there's nothing remotely romantic or heroic about him, nor anything 'epic' about his situation. Even his relationship with Catherine underscores the absurdity, the mess, the out-and-out wrongness of war. What would otherwise have been a passing attraction turns into a great love; he runs from the battlefield to live with her in peace and quiet, and in the end finds life would have been kinder to let him die in uniform.The ending is inevitable, of course. It made me cry.Gosh, this is turning into quite a surprising experiment, isn't it? Who would have thought I'd be bashing Peter Pan and writing admiringly of Hemingway?!(Oh, and I went back and forth between my paperback copy and the audiobook read by John Slattery, who is excellent. Isn't he on Mad Men? I think that's the guy.)