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Book Review
Dec. 29th, 2006 08:05 pmA Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
I wasn't all that impressed with this book. Hemingway's got a nice, sparse prose style. I also really liked the way he portrayed WWI through the eyes of a volunteer ambulance driver, Fred Henry. Hemingway deftly refrains from giving the reader any sense of the overall history of the war, in whole or im part. Instead, he sticks with the ground-level view of Henry, in which things happen but there is never any sense of the strategy or goals behind events.
However, A Farewell to Arms has a gaping flaw: the character of Catherine Barkley and the relationship between her and Henry. It's not exactly that Hemingway has done a bad job of characterizing Catherine - it's that he's barely done any job of it at all. She has very little personality and hardly any desires or motivations of her own. Worse yet, she often seems to be nothing more than male wish-fulfillment: Catherine repeatedly avers that she only wants to go wherever Henry goes and do whatever he wishes to do. She makes no real demands of her own, voices no real desires independent of Henry's. Even when pregnant, she continues to be unbelievably undemanding, telling Henry that although she is going to have his child, he doesn't have to worry about it. I'm quite frankly surprised that a novel with such a large flaw as this could be considered one of the greats.
by Ernest Hemingway
I wasn't all that impressed with this book. Hemingway's got a nice, sparse prose style. I also really liked the way he portrayed WWI through the eyes of a volunteer ambulance driver, Fred Henry. Hemingway deftly refrains from giving the reader any sense of the overall history of the war, in whole or im part. Instead, he sticks with the ground-level view of Henry, in which things happen but there is never any sense of the strategy or goals behind events.
However, A Farewell to Arms has a gaping flaw: the character of Catherine Barkley and the relationship between her and Henry. It's not exactly that Hemingway has done a bad job of characterizing Catherine - it's that he's barely done any job of it at all. She has very little personality and hardly any desires or motivations of her own. Worse yet, she often seems to be nothing more than male wish-fulfillment: Catherine repeatedly avers that she only wants to go wherever Henry goes and do whatever he wishes to do. She makes no real demands of her own, voices no real desires independent of Henry's. Even when pregnant, she continues to be unbelievably undemanding, telling Henry that although she is going to have his child, he doesn't have to worry about it. I'm quite frankly surprised that a novel with such a large flaw as this could be considered one of the greats.
