Knowing when to give up on a book

In 2018 I wrote a blog called “Thank God for Novels” about rereading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and loving it: “. . . that book blew me away: love, loyalty, the longing for freedom and liberty, betrayal, courage, friendship, women, politics, Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, terrorism, idealism, suicide, and death.”

Yesterday, in 2021, I quit rereading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms about a third of the way through. The only reason I was rereading this book, which as I recall I didn’t like in the first place, is because I recently watched the Ken Burns Hemingway documentary and got really angry at one of the talking heads in the film, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist and essayist. In the film Llosa talks about how much he loved A Farewell to Arms—Hemingway’s “best novel”—and how much he hated For Whom the Bell Tolls—sentimental crap. I knew the real reason he didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls, but it still made me furious that he got to spew his prejudice out on camera. Llosa, who was once a “liberal” but became a “neoliberal,” didn’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls because he didn’t like its politics, not because of its love scenes.

So I decided to reread A Farewell to Arms to prove my case. It started out all right, with a beautiful description of the Italian/Austrian border town where the American protagonist is stationed as an ambulance driver in World War I for the Italian Army (based on Hemingway’s own experience). It quickly descended into Hemingwayesque: “I went down to the mess to eat. Then I went outside to see what was happening with the cars. The mechanics were working on them to get ready for the next attack.” These are my words, not Hemingway’s, but they could be his. Next the protagonist meets Catherine, the English nurse who turns the novel into a love story. Their conversation consists of nothing beyond themselves: getting to know each other (if you can call it that: there’s no background information about where they’re from, what they’ve done, except for her former boyfriend, who died in the war); falling in love (within a couple of days); getting pregnant; deserting from the army (Catherine does have a great line about that: “Darling (she always calls him “Darling”), please be sensible. It’s not deserting from the army. It’s only the Italian Army.”); dying in childbirth. Is this the precursor of autofiction?

I’d already set the book aside for a few days without a definitive decision about whether to continue. Then last night I was talking with John Nichols on the phone, whom I’d already talked with about the Hemingway documentary and Vargas Llosa, and told him I was reading A Farwell to Arms but was thinking of giving it up. He told me the only two pages he’d read were the first and last and then quoted from each: the dust on the tree trunks and leaves from the marching troops, on page one, and on the last page, “It was like saying goodby to a statue.” He gave me his blessing to quit.