ecliggott 's review for:

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

4.0

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Slogging through "The Old Man and the Sea" in high school turned me off to Hemingway. Compared to my favorite Fitzgerald and "Gatsby," I found Hemingway's style to be the dullest of dull. His appearances in my recent reading - "The Paris Wife," "Zelda," - got me interested in revisiting him/feeling guilty that I hadn't given him a chance. "A Farewell to Arms" certainly starts off slowly, with sentences like this: "The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves." Oy vey. But as the narrator engages with others, developing meaningful and often painfully fraught relationships, and experiences absurd wartime scenarios that reminded me of its successors like "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse Five," I felt more and more compelled to read on. By the gripping end of the story, Mr. Hemingway had converted me.