A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

My students, like all students, have a tendency to ramble. Entire paragraphs without punctuation, sentences that are pretty much paragraphs, subordinate clauses with no mains, etc. After their first essays (usually unreadable, usually on the First World War) I tell them to read Hemingway, in particular A Farwell to Arms, and see if they can learn by imitation. Nobody ever reads the book, but it’s a nice ritual I’ve grown accustomed to.

When I first read the book I was 15 and really struggled to understand why Fredric would ever volunteer to fight in World War One. I still ask myself that very same question, but hey. I also don’t quite know whether I was simply immature and focusing only on the main character, or whether Hemingway just didn’t really care about Catherine and the baby, but I barely remember that she dies and he is stillborn, although I clearly remember Frederic’s sad final stroll through Lausanne.

And yet, in spite of the perplexities I had and still have about this book, I consider it one of the greatest works ever written.