top of page
Tim O'Brien

882. Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell To Arms


I enjoyed this more than I expected.

I can’t see anything special about his prose style. But I enjoyed this as a novel about an American in Europe, 30ish years post Henry James but not in the middle of the 1st world war, where the central figure is an ambulance driver with the Italians.

North Italy/ the southern Alps are beautifully described (almost as a travelogue).

The central figure views himself as slightly superior to the mainly peasant Italians he works with.

The plot is quite simple; ambulance driving in an apparently losing cause, dreadful injury, love with an English nurse with whom he escapes to Switzerland, where she delivers a stillborn child and dies herself post childbirth.

Better than I anticipated – read it because there is a very good biography of Hemingway on TV.


Comments


bottom of page