Guys I’m 9 chapters in to A Farewell to Arms and frankly I can’t wait to say farewell to this book. It is so inconceivably boring that I’ve had to switch between reading it and listening to an audiobook just to focus and pay attention. Admittedly there’s time for it to get better, but every time Hemingway describes scenery I want to bang my head into a wall.
The amount of “there were” and “there was” phrases stand out even more if you’re listening to the book, and it makes the whole thing sound passive and stagnant. Well, in keeping with the idea that Hemingway has only two conjunctions in his vocabulary, I can do that too: War is bad, love is good. The end. I don’t care if it’s a stylistic choice, but it does nothing to immerse me as a reader. For me one of the most important things about a book is exposition, the structure of how it’s written. I love seeing evidence of a mastery of the craft. Hemingway doesn’t deliver. The characters sound so dimwitted, I don’t care what happens to them, and as of right now, the war feels like an afterthought. I forget it’s even happening. And I don’t care that war makes people do desperate things: if characters in a lauded love story kiss after like fifty pages, I’m not invested. The way Hemingway talks about love is just stupid, or rather the way he makes his characters talk about it is stupid. I can already tell neither of them will have much spine, and Catherine is just going to say whatever our narrator wants to hear since she’s every soldier’s fever dream. Speaking of our narrator, he talks about the war with all the excitement of filing an insurance claim. Being monotone does not make you sound profound. As far as I’m concerned, this guy is the personification of a brooding mustache.
I felt much the same way when I had to read “The Old Man and the Sea” back in high school, and I’m just convinced Hemingway isn’t for me. If anyone likes this book at all, please tell me why because I don’t get it.
“As far as I’m concerned, this guy is the personification of a brooding mustache.”
Laughed hard at this and adore your tags.
The Old Man and the Sea is almost unforgivable.
The Sun Also Rises (post-war), In Our Time (GW related content), and A Moveable Feast are all worth it, in my opinion.
I finished the reading, and while I ADORE The Sun Also Rises(the post-war novel the professor mentioned), I can understand the boredom with this novel. I felt it at sections. I love Hemingway’s character work and how he can sometimes perfectly capture emotional states, but as far as I’m concerned this main character is the weakest character I’ve ever seen Hemingway write, and I also don’t like him. I think Catherine is more complicated than you might give her credit for, since she’s self-aware she’s playing at a fantasy (in my opinion), but the narrator is insufferably dull or detached a lot of the time. He has decent moments, but overall I just don’t care about him. Rinaldi and the priest are infinitely more interesting, or any of the mechanic characters.
And if the descriptions were shortened (or used anything other than the “There was a/the generic adjective generic noun” formula), I feel like the prose would communicate more personality since it’s more compressed and we could like/understand the narrator better.
Bad Hemingway. Stop cluttering your novel with bad imagery and live up to your concise reputation.
So real. The narrator is so annoying, too, I can barely stand him. Men stop objectifying women and using them as a means of entertainment challenge. Hemingway, why?
I’m so glad you posted this, because I would’ve done it myself if no one else did first. I can’t even quite put my finger on exactly why I don’t like this book, but there’s just something about the narration style that is absolutely NOT speaking to me. This is my first Hemingway I’ve ever read so I really wanted to give it a fair chance since I know how influential he was, but after 12 chapters I’m still not feeling it. Something about it just feels so flat to me, and I’ve been so bored and feel like literally nothing has happened so far even after the more intense events of chapter 9. I will say, I did have to laugh at the line “‘I was blown up while we were eating cheese'” (63). I don’t think there was any part in the book so far that I connected to the narrator in the slightest until that line (and unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find that connection again since).
Thank you so much for saying this. I feel that everyone praises Hemmingway, but I legitimately can’t stand him as an author. His writing style is absolutely atrocious. Wet cardboard has more flavor.
-Hemmingway’s (and Faulkner’s) biggest hater.
Out of curiosity (have never read Faulkner so no opinion/knowledge there), what other Hemingway have you read?
I’ve only read The Sun Also Rises before reading A Farewell to Arms. Please do not read Faulkner’s Sanctuary. It is literally the most traumatizing and disturbing book I’ve ever read, no joke.