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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1994-02-27
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<text>
<title>
(1920s) A Farewell To Arms
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1920s Highlights
Books
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
A Farewell To Arms
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(OCTOBER 14, 1929)
</p>
<p> A Farewell to Arms--Ernest Hemingway. This story of
Lieutenant Frederic Henry, U.S. ambulance officer on the Italian
Front, of his campaigns and leaves of absence, of the swarming
Caparetto retreat, of the Lieutenant's affair with Catharine
Barkley, an English nurse who died in childbirth when he had
deserted the wars and taken her to Switzerland, is infused with
the chaotic sweep of armies and tenderly quiescent love. In its
sustained, inexorable movement, its throbbing preoccupation with
flesh and blood and nerves rather than the fanciful fabrics of
intellect, it fulfills the prophecies that his most excited
admirers have made about Ernest Hemingway. His mannered style,
consciously bald, may still be annoying to some, but its pulsing
innuendo cannot be denied.
</p>
<p> In its depiction of War, the novel bears comparison with its
best predecessors. But it is in the hero's perhaps unethical
quitting of the battle line to be with the woman whom he has
gotten with child that it achieves its greatest significance.
Love is more maligned in literature than any other emotion, by
romantic distortion on the one hand, by carnal diminution on the
other. But Author Hemingway knows it at its best to be a blend
of desire, serenity, and wordless sympathy. His man and woman
stand incoherently together against a shattered, dissolving
world.
</p>
<p> The boredom and inertia so frequent in Author Hemingway's The
Sun Also Rises never occur in A Farewell to Arms. He has gone
to the cause of that weariness--the desolating conflict of
nations. In that time bravery and rapture were gloriously
commonplace, scarcely aware of the exhaustion which was to
follow.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>