A Farewell to Arms

Yeah, bitch! Hemingway!

All in all, it's been a pretty active vacation for my new wife and me, but between all the hiking, diving, sightseeing, and eating - no, gorging - we've had some downtime to read books on the beach and by the pool and such. I'm halfway through a second book now, and feel like I should make my post about this one before thoughts on the two cloud together at all.

I liked it, and I liked it a lot. I've read Hemingway before, just prior to the Back-Blogged era, in The Old Man and the Sea. I'm inclined to say that this book was better than that one, but comparing a World War I romance novel to a novella about the epic struggle between an old fisherman and a giant marlin feels a bit misguided. A Farewell to Arms was probably more flawed, but also far more complex. And God, was it sad. Hemingway wrote in a simple prose and so far it seems like he stuck to writing about simple themes. Here, those themes are basically that war sucks and that love opens up the door for loss and pain. Nothing you don't already know. There isn't even much of an internal conflict going on anywhere, and the external one is just World War I itself. The book spends nearly equal amounts of time depicting the shittiness of war and the passion and happiness of young lovers, and it all just really worked for me.

My biggest praise for the book and its author, though, goes to Hemingway's short, frank, and abrupt prose. Blog readers may recall the wrath I've had in the past for the overly eloquent verbiage found throughout classic works from the nineteenth century. Here are the first two sentence's of the book's famous opening paragraph:

"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels."

Two sentences, simply structured, and without a single word of more than two syllables. A kindergartner could form a mental understanding of the scene depicted here. Compare this to an equally famous opening passage in literary history, that of A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was great the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Holy hell. That's just one sentence! I like that sentence and I liked that book, but what the fuck is "the superlative degree of comparison only?" Was there really no easier way to say that "[the period's] noisiest authorities insisted on its being received?" It's all beautifully written and not beyond comprehension by any stretch, but I will always be grateful to men like Hemingway for reversing the once-popular trend of inflated sentences filled with whimsy and showing that you can paint a very clear picture of the story you're telling with simple language and well-paced structure.

Tangent over. Good book. See you guys later.