It was a huge disappointment re-reading Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" again. The first time I read it was when I was a teenager in college and the tragic, touching love story felt so bittersweet. Today, the book seems so bland and banal. The different threads of the story (the war and the romance) seem disjointed. It is like someone lecturing on how they decided to prepare a particular dish and making everyone wait for hours. By then, everyone has lost their appetite.
Hemingway would later do the same in "
The Old Man and the Sea", but then fortunately, he had the sense to keep the digressions to a minimum. In this book, the story does not define its center properly. Is it about the meaninglessness of war or the nostalgia of lost love? Because either of those story lines are compromised by the other. The protagonist escapes from the war because he is in love. Or does he find love more alluring because of the dreadful war? The brutality of the battlefield is never displayed in stark terms, unlike a book like "Catch 22". The love story, for the most part, is reduced to strolls and dinners, and some of the dialogues seem cliched than real. A
brutal throwaway comment about Othello is revealing of Hemingway's racism, indicative of the times he lived in.
A bit of saving grace is that the book contains some immensely quotable pieces of writing, such as this:
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in 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.
Tags: fiction romance
