A
Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
As a youth of 18, Ernest Hemingway was eager to fight in the Great
War. Poor vision kept him out of the army, so he joined the ambulance corps
instead and was sent to France. Then he transferred to Italy where he became
the first American wounded in that country during World War I. Hemingway
came out of the European battlefields with a medal for valor and a wealth
of experience that he would, 10 years later, spin into literary gold with
A Farewell to Arms. This is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American,
and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two meet in Italy, and almost
immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous
nature of love in a time of war. During their first encounter, Catherine
tells Henry about her fiancé of eight years who had been killed the year
before in the Somme. Explaining why she hadn't married him, she says she
was afraid marriage would be bad for him, then admits:
I wanted to do something for him. You see, I didn't care about
the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything
he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything.
I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know.
The two begin an affair, with Henry quite convinced that he "did not love
Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like
bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards." Soon enough,
however, the game turns serious for both of them and ultimately Henry ends
up deserting to be with Catherine.
Hemingway was not known for either unbridled optimism or happy endings,
and A Farewell to Arms, like his other novels (For Whom the Bell Tolls,
The Sun Also Rises, and To Have and Have Not), offers neither. What it
does provide is an unblinking portrayal of men and women behaving with
grace under pressure, both physical and psychological, and somehow finding
the courage to go on in the face of certain loss. --Alix Wilber - Amazon.com
(Paperback - June 1995)
The
Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - June 1999)
The
Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - March 1995)
For
Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere
in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing.
Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades,
lies "flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on
his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine
trees." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan
is there: he has come to blow up a bridge on behalf of the antifascist
guerrilla forces. He hopes he'll be able to rely on their local leader,
Pablo, to help carry out the mission, but upon meeting him, Jordan has
his doubts: "I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad.
That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That
is the sadness that comes before the sell-out." For Pablo, it seems, has
had enough of the war. He has amassed for himself a small herd of horses
and wants only to stay quietly in the hills and attract as little attention
as possible. Jordan's arrival--and his mission--have seriously alarmed
him.
"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow
a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for
us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they
will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned
to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and
tell me what I must do?"
In one short chapter Hemingway lays out the blueprint for what is to come:
Jordan's sense of duty versus Pablo's dangerous self-interest and weariness
with the war. Complicating matters even more are two members of the guerrilla
leader's small band: his "woman" Pilar, and Maria, a young woman whom Pablo
rescued from a Republican prison train. Unlike her man, Pilar is still
fiercely devoted to the cause and as Pablo's loyalty wanes, she becomes
the moral center of the group. Soon Jordan finds himself caught between
the two, even as his own resolve is tested by his growing feelings for
Maria.
For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions:
war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last
stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter,
ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission
perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological
acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most
mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix
Wilber - Amazon.com
(Paperback - July 1995)
Hemingway
on Fishing
by Ernest Hemingway, et al
(Hardcover)
Ernest
Hemingway A to Z
by Charles M. Oliver
(Paperback - June 1999)
In
Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - January 1996)
 |
The
Dangerous Summer
by Ernest Hemingway, James A. Michener (Introduction)
(Paperback - December 1997) |
To
Have and Have Not
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - March 1996)
The
Garden of Eden
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - September 1995)
Walks
in Hemingway's Paris: A Guide to Paris for the Literary Traveler
by Noel Riley Fitch
(Paperback - April 1992)
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties
by Ronald Berman
(Hardcover - January 2001)
Out of Print
A
Hemingway Odyssey : Special Places in His Life
by H. Lea Lawrence, Ernest Big Two-Hearted River Hemingway
(Paperback - May 1999)
El Viejo Y El Mar
by Ernest Hemingway, et al
(Paperback - April 1999)
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