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sashapasha 's review for:
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
2.5 stars.
It was ok. I didn't hate it, but I definitely didn't love it either. The relationship between the protagonist, ambulance driver Fred, and his lover, Nurse Barkley, seemed incredibly superficial and fake to me. Something about their dialogue struct me as particularly disingenuous, and I couldn't tell if their relationship was meant to seem superficial or if Hemingway was trying to make their connection feel real, in which case he failed.
I was also thoroughly unimpressed with Hemingway’s macho masculinity and his depiction of women in general. Clearly he wrote this before feminism was invented, or at least before feminism became mainstream enough for him to be unable to ignore it. Besides Nurse Barkley having air-headed dialogue, she also displayed an extreme level of self-sacrifice in her relationship (“there’s no me, there’s only you”) and self-blame for getting pregnant (it takes two), repeatedly apologized to her lover for not looking, or being, good enough for him, and was always deferent to his whims. The other female characters weren't much better, and the men had some pretty unsavory moments as well. For example, some soldiers called two girls “difficult” for not wanting to get raped, and the protagonist seemed to agree with this assessment rather than attempting to see it from the girls' viewpoint for a moment.
In light of his opinion of women, I was somewhat surprised by what I assume was a conscious juxtaposition of childbirth for women against war for men, because that would've given women more acknowledgement than he deemed them worth. I'm no literature major though, and there's every chance that I missed or misinterpreted the Point. If I had to summarize, the overall message I got was "war sucks, and even when you escape war, life sucks." But that might not have been the intended takeaway.
Sidenote, don’t read Chapter 9 while eating. War is awful.
It was ok. I didn't hate it, but I definitely didn't love it either. The relationship between the protagonist, ambulance driver Fred, and his lover, Nurse Barkley, seemed incredibly superficial and fake to me. Something about their dialogue struct me as particularly disingenuous, and I couldn't tell if their relationship was meant to seem superficial or if Hemingway was trying to make their connection feel real, in which case he failed.
I was also thoroughly unimpressed with Hemingway’s macho masculinity and his depiction of women in general. Clearly he wrote this before feminism was invented, or at least before feminism became mainstream enough for him to be unable to ignore it. Besides Nurse Barkley having air-headed dialogue, she also displayed an extreme level of self-sacrifice in her relationship (“there’s no me, there’s only you”) and self-blame for getting pregnant (it takes two), repeatedly apologized to her lover for not looking, or being, good enough for him, and was always deferent to his whims. The other female characters weren't much better, and the men had some pretty unsavory moments as well. For example, some soldiers called two girls “difficult” for not wanting to get raped, and the protagonist seemed to agree with this assessment rather than attempting to see it from the girls' viewpoint for a moment.
In light of his opinion of women, I was somewhat surprised by what I assume was a conscious juxtaposition of childbirth for women against war for men, because that would've given women more acknowledgement than he deemed them worth. I'm no literature major though, and there's every chance that I missed or misinterpreted the Point. If I had to summarize, the overall message I got was "war sucks, and even when you escape war, life sucks." But that might not have been the intended takeaway.
Sidenote, don’t read Chapter 9 while eating. War is awful.