Whoever said "youth is wasted on the young," knew what they were talking about. I just finished reading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. As a youth, I wasn't impressed. Now, older and hopefully wiser, I enjoyed the novel.
What was I thinking?
A Farewell to Arms has romance, action, beauty, travel, and many of the travails of life. I understand the novel to be semi-autobiographical. Isn't all writing? The narrator, Frederick Henry, is an American ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I. He is wounded and sent to a hospital where he falls in love with an English nurse. They are very much in love.
The scenery is beautiful. The war is ugly. Hemingway depicts the reality of fighting in explicit language. That's what he is good at. The sex is not explicit. He will just make it inherently obvious--they spent the night in bed. Eventually, the nurse gets pregnant.
Hemingway reveals how war time erodes morality. The nurse and Frederick talk of marriage but it's not important. Having a baby and not married should have been an important consideration, during those times, but they don't marry. A group of Italian soldiers disobey Frederick's commands. He shoots and kills the sergeant. The rest of the soldiers run away. Frederick, himself eventually runs away. He deserts.
He and the nurse escape to Switzerland. Here the novel ends. I won't spoil the end for you, but this is a war story and war inflicts horrific endings for all involved.
Interesting, Italy banned the book because it showed Italians retreating. Ireland banned the book because of the sex. The Nazis banned the book because they weren't portrayed as heroic Aryans. These are reasons alone for reading A Farewell to Arms.
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