Recently I picked up a book called “A farewell to arms” from the ‘classics’ section of my local library (transalted to Serbian). Not long after I returned the book, thinking that my edition just happened to have a terrible translation. I went out of my way and got the German translation which was just as awful. Finally I bit the bullet and bought the English (a language I harbour no respect for) version to put to rest my conflictions on whether the book was ‘special’ or the translators just fucked up.
I am so perplexed as to what the author wanted to say. The plot is straightforward, the characters and their motivations too, I’d go so far to call them one-dimensional. If it is meant to depict ordinary people in their struggle against war, love, destruction and courage, of their gender dynamics etc. Then I suppose it is made for an Infantile audience because there was not a single thought-provoking chapter in the book.
It is clear that it was not meant to be a beautiful book either because, well, it’s self explanatory. The author writes in such an insipid way that I wanted to claw out the pages multiple times just from sheer boredom. It’s like listening to Forest Gump babbling for an entire fucking book. You know that part in American Psycho (book) where they exhaustively enumerate all of the items present… yeah except that has a clear function to serve, unlike here where it’s just a habit of the author.
To conclude, I do not get what function this book serves. Oscar Wilde wrote for beauty, Byron for his heart, Dante for Beatrice, Marx for his ideas, Dostoyevsky because he was a fucking gambler… What is the reason that Hemingway wrote this novel?? What compels you to make such a torturous book to read?
I have not read a lot of ‘American’ classical literature, spare for Nabokov and Ayn Rand, both part Russian (one of which certainly mentally challenged (ancap))
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Do you like Piet Mondrian’s paintings?
Hemingway is revered for telling stories that common people connected with emotionally, in plain, short, simple prose.
I’m not his biggest fan, but he had a gift for putting emotion into very few words that don’t look like they carry a lot of emotion.
The short story “Hills Like White Elephants” is, to me, his greatest triumph. It’s about an abortion. But it’s just two people talking for a short while, and he never once says the word abortion.
Probably my favorite author. “Tough, terse prose” I have heard it described as. I love the way he writes. Nothing superfluous, no fat, not trying for poetry, just a real story playing out as though I am observing it. It’s not for everyone, but either are many other well known authors. I didn’t like Don Quixote, a book loved by millions.
Hemingway is known for the sparseness of his prose. He sliced and sliced until he had the absolute bare minimum of words he felt were needed to tell the story.
The majority of the authors of what are considered the ‘classics’ of literature did NOT set to write them with some grand symbolism or meaning, they simply had an idea and then another one and those formed themselves into a story and they wrote it down.
There’s nothing wrong with Hemingway but his novels haven’t aged well because many readers simply don’t understand the context anymore.
Hemingway wrote a lot in the period after World War 1. WW1 was hugely influential on the world, not just because it was a war like nobody had ever seen. But it irrevocably changed Western culture.
Before World War 1, Western society still revolved around traditional gender roles, notions of honor, and clear ideas about what a person’s role in society was. Men signed up to fight in the war en masse thinking they would do their part for their country, bring honor to their name, and come back a hero.
The industrialized meat grinder destroyed that notion. It didn’t just chew up millions and send even more men home physically maimed. They were mentally destroyed. The great war destroyed everything they thought was true about society. It put the lie to it all, to the silly notion of honor and chivalry, the importance of gender roles. The post-WW1 generation stopped caring about all it to the point where they were named the lost generation.
Hemingway writes a lot about that futility. About coming to terms with the unfairness of the world and how to try and find renewed purpose.
Farewell to Arms is a novel that looks at loss, inevitability, disillusionment, and the absence of meaning in it all. It can feel boring because it doesn’t go anywhere and that’s the point. There’s no hero overcoming adversity and winning. No love story that results in a happy ending. There’s just people struggling to do their best and coming up short.
Hemingway’s characters are often ‘code heroes’. Characters that try to live their lives according to a personal code that dictates how they deal with adversity. And often they are not rewarded for their efforts because that’s not how the real world works.
The problem is that WWI is far enough in the past by now that people have forgotten the lost generation. They know factually that the war was bad but they have no connection to the devastating sense of futility it created. It makes Hemingway’s stories difficult to relate to.