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))