Literary folks: can someone please be explaining to me?

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smurfco

Meatus McPrepuce
A Farewell To Arms

I slogged through this so called American classic. It was boring as shit and I don't think I "got it".

usually when I read a classic for the first time I can understand why it's a classic. Most of them are really good, but even the ones that I don't find entertaining I can at least still appreciate.

But can somebody smarter than me please explain what makes a farewell to arms so great? Because I could barely get through it. I am genuinely interested in why. Is it the context of the time? Is there something I am just missing?
 
I didn't really like that book very much. I cannot provide any literary analysis of the book and why it is significant, as this well is beyond my area of expertise. I can just say that to me it read like a slow paced mix of an uninteresting love story with a crappy ending and a random soldier wandering around somewhat aimlessly during a war. I'm sure the book is full of deeper significance to those with a mind for great literature, but I just didn't care enough about any of the stories to really get into it.
 
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The only Hemingway I've read so far is Old Man and the Sea. I need to delve into one of his beefier works eventually... maybe I won't start with Farewell to Arms. :tongue:
 
I've not actually read that one, because I've not particularly cared for the other Hemingway novels I've read. However, I do have an appreciation for his direct, uncluttered writing style, and I'm sure in the context of the time it was a breath of fresh air and indication of where American lit was heading.
 
Tiltsta said:
I didn't really like that book very much. I cannot provide any literary analysis of book and why it is significant, as this well is beyond my area of expertise. I can just say that to me it read like a slow paced mix of an uninteresting love story with a crappy ending and a random soldier wandering around somewhat aimlessly during a war. I'm sure the book is full of deeper significance to those with a mind for great literature, but I just didn't care enough about any of the stories to really get into it.
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Exactly how I felt!
 
There are a lot of "classics" that are boring as hell IMO. They are lauded for the beautiful writing, the imagery the author creates...blah blah blah.

If the book doesn't make me want stay up to finish the next chapter cause it's so good...it won't be a classic in my view. So for me anything by DH Lawrence I will never read after being tortured by Sons and Lovers...utter drivel.

I did like The Old Man and the Sea and for Whom the Bell Tolls OTOH
 
The only Hemingway I read was The Sun Also Rises which I despise with the heat of a thousand suns...
 
Sorry that article was awful...old school writer talking more about style than story in an overwrought manner of one who spends too much time dissecting books for deeper meaning than enjoying (or loathing) the work for what it is.
 
I've never read A Farewell to Arms.

So much of Hemingway is subtext and what's unsaid. I read most of his major novels in my very early teens, and I loved Old Man and the Sea and enjoyed parts of the rest of his novels. But I've revisited some of them as an adult, and The Sun Also Rises is an absolute powerhouse. A ton of his short fiction is stunning.
 
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house
in a village that looked across the river and the plain to
the mountains. In the bed of the river there were peb-
bles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the
water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the
channels. Troops went by the house and down the road
and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the
trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the
leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops march-
ing along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred
by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and
afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Hemingway had a very distinctive prose style that was revolutionary at the time and which was very influential on the writers who followed him.

For comparison, here is the beginning of another famous/influential novel published just a few years earlier:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:


—Introibo ad altare Dei.


Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:


—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!


Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
 
I find most "American Classics" to be mind-numbing in their boredom. Maybe there there's some sort of wonderful allusion hiding in there, but if you can't stay awake past page 3, what does it matter?

The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are two more snoozers that come to mind. I can't believe they still make high-schoolers read those!
 
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GomezAddams said:
I find most "American Classics" to be mind-numbing in their boredom. Maybe there there's some sort of wonderful allusion hiding in there, but if you can't stay awake past page 3, what does it matter?

The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are two more snoozers that come to mind. I can't believe they still make high-schoolers read those!
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Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.


And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.


Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----


So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
 
rsadasiv said:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.


And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.


Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----


So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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Thanks for the corroborating sample.
 
GomezAddams said:
I find most "American Classics" to be mind-numbing in their boredom. Maybe there there's some sort of wonderful allusion hiding in there, but if you can't stay awake past page 3, what does it matter?

The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby are two more snoozers that come to mind. I can't believe they still make high-schoolers read those!
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It's supposed to fuel critical thinking as it relates to reading. But often it's trying to find deeper meaning in the obvious. I generally liken it to the over analysis of Hamlet. A young man apparently can't be despondent and reflective about his father's death nor can he be angry and lash out at his family when his mother quickly remarries (his uncle of all people) without it meaning he secretly wants to sleep with his mother. The Oedipal complex thrust upon Hamlet by some distracts from a better angle about the nuances of human emotion, unspoken anger over why he wasn't given his father's throne, and more. Sometimes a book is just the words on the page and the literati impose meaning in a manner that justifies their role in society.

I love many books for many reasons. Some give me pause to think about myself and/or the world around me, while others provide a momentary and fleeting distraction. And there are many that fall between those points. There are also many that I regret wasting my time on and a few (although there should have been more) that I stopped reading because they were so not hitting any chords with me or were just shit.

Literature is like any other art. It has a rich history and a lot of it needs context to be understood or appreciated in an academic way, but what's good, great, or shit in it is really up to the reader. So regardless of education, taste, analysis, etc. we can and should read and enjoy what we like and avoid (or stop) reading that which gives us no pleasure.
 
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