A farwell to arms

A Farwell to Arms Ernest Hemingway

Vintage Classics £7.99 pp.293

Wait please. Be patient. Enjoy the moment. If you are in a rush for the extraordinary, then Hemingway’s Farwell to Arms is not for you. I know it is a story about war and love, I know. But it is told in the most ordinary way it is possible to write about war and love. Few deaths. Few battles. No suspense. Little drama. A love so simple as it were if real. And I am sorry to tell: that is the best of it.

The story goes on in the north Italian mountains, during the war against Austria, in 1917. The storyteller is Frederic Henry – much of Hemingway himself –, an American voluntary driving an ambulance in the Italian army. Through Henry, Hemingway portrays the lives of common soldiers who are more worried about the coming whores than with the outcome of the battles. But the war stories are just an excuse to tell a poignant narrative, one of his best, on human love.

Above all things, this is a story about love. A love between il Tenente and Catherine Barkley, an American nurse. A love that is not a fairy tale. Nor even a burning desire at first sight. Hemingway made this love perfectly real. His vigorous verve, short of full of conversation and action, just helped to make Farewell to Arms seem more banal. But do not let yourself to be deceived for that is what makes it so moving.

When you reach to the last lines of the book, the ones that confessedly took him loads of tries, then you can understand it. You will turn the pages back and start to read it again. Every dialogue about Henry’s bear, about Cat’s clothes, will catch your eye. And you will wish that gone-banality of a simple love would last forever. When you know it won’t, you will be too dry to weep and too hollow to go on. And you will fell like joining Henry for a night walk in the rain.