by Ernest Hemingway
ISBN: 978-0-09-991010-7
First published 1929
293 pages
Cover illustration: Unknown
Publisher: Penguin Random House
5/5 Stars
A part-fictionalized version of the Italian defeat at Caporetto. Part-auto-biography, part fiction, the writing is always lucid and always exact.
Hemingway’s prose has a sing-a-long quality, which he directly intended. The paragraphs can be long or short, the speech patterns complex or simple. These mimic the conversations the characters have, small-talk and banter, or deep and personal.
Characters are fleeting, but still real and presented in context. The reader is present at all times. The book is written in the first person. The hero is not Hemingway, it is Frederick Henry, but that it almost irrelevant when we think the hero could be any of us. Part anti-hero, part-leader, part-actor, part-coward, part-survivor.
It is the situation that cannot be overcome and Frederick Henry seeks to survive, through love, friendship, alcohol, violence and retreat. With deep religious overtones, a pacifist sentiment, this was and is a book for any times.
The Eclectic Book Review 