A Farewell to Arms

⚖The case for it

The Caporetto retreat is what readers come back for, a “masterful many-page description of the Italian army’s retreat” that holds for pages without once reaching for a big emotion, and the executions along the road are as unsentimental as anything in American fiction. Admirers credit Hemingway with pulling “the Western literary world out of their obsession with gaudy, florid prose,” leaving the reader to supply what the sentences withhold. Catherine strikes her defenders as “the eternal feminine in nursing dress.” Readers assigned the book at seventeen and returning at thirty-five report a different novel the second time, and Rinaldi and the priest keep the war talk honest between them.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Catherine agrees with Frederic and little else: “insipid, silly and annoying,” says one reader, while another finished the book and admits “I’ve already forgotten her name.” Frederic is no easier company, “self-absorbed, unthinking, unfeeling,” which leaves the central romance without a person on either side of it, a couple critics describe as “in love with the idea of being in love.” The stripped dialogue creates its own confusion, with readers flagging pages where there is “absolutely no indication of who is saying what.” Between the retreat and the hospital sits a great deal of countryside and drinking that reads as “a travel log written by a soldier.” “He went there and had a beer.”

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings