Took me all week to read this, because I began the week trying to read 'Mary Barton' by Mrs. Gaskell.
I seem to have had a fall out with her because I remember enjoying 'North & South' many years ago, but I tried and failed to read 'Wives & Daughters' about a year ago. 'Mary Barton' seems to have no plot and to be read apologising to her middle-class readers for the shock she expects them to feel about the state of the working class in Manchester. The style is almost homiletic — “You might have assumed reader, that... .but actually...". Endless examples of this... .and no great plot.
So reluctantly I gave up.
'A Farewell to Arms' is of the Strix & Paddy Lymington (market) March 1977 era and has sat on a bookcase,. a dusty orange penguin edition since then (at least I had never read it).
It took me a bit of time to get into it but it becomes very good, Hemingway’s dry style a bit like Chandler. It is quite a nihilistic book about a cynical American who by accident is working for the Italians as an ambulance officer at the end of the first world war (the Italians are fighting with the British/French against the Germans/Austrians in this war, in case you are confused as I was).
It is a very bleak war, the soldiers fight without purpose, and in the end he deserts to flee to Switzerland with his pregnant Scottish girlfriend, who dies in childbirth along with the baby right at the end.
Not quite clear from this what Hemingway is about, but I would read another.
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