Finish Your Summer Reading List: A Farewell to Arms Book Review

Like most male American highschoolers with little literary orientation, the first exposure to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was the loose reference in the first Golgo-13 Nintendo game. I had a chuckle when I thought of the stoic Duke Togo grunting in frustration from the inability to wave goodbye to his amputated arms.

But then I found out it was an actual book, and it was on the summer reading list, and that the book was longer than 100 pages and involved Italian loan words and edited-out curse words. Then I found myself in a War of the Worlds scenario in having to drudge through something I thought would be enjoyable (I didn’t like WotW because it used words like “curator” and my 7th grade vocabulary didn’t get to that point).

One thing made it worthwhile, though, and that was Hemingway’s airy, childish prose. It gulled some kids into thinking they could write like that with little effort. The dude just did not want to clause it up—commas were the Austro-Hungarians pelting him with bee-bees and periods were his Italian goombah war buddies. And the dialogue (when they weren’t using those smartypants loan words)…it just sounded so real, like he listened to how people actually talked and committed it to paper word-for-word instead of transcribing the essence into print. No need for too much thinking, just leave a tape recorder in a public park and write down what you hear for future use. Turnkey fiction writing.

The book is famous, yadda yadda, but most of that value comes from Hemingway’s first hand experience with war. That dialogue, affinity for drink at any time, the nonchalant mentions of events of shattering importance, and wartime convalescence feels real because it was real, to Hemingway’s mind, though the book isn’t entirely autobiographical.

The other side of value was the relationship between Henry and Barkley, which was the real meat of the plot. There was surfacey pleasure in determining whether or not Barkley was stupid or really just retarded. Besides that, it provided an opportunity for that one kid in class to declare that their relationship was “the real war Tenente fought!” with maddening self-assurance. I hate that kid. Don’t ever be that kid.