Read: A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

This book has relationships to two books I have been reading earlier this year: It is the second one authored by Hemingway and the second classical American novel set at a World War stage. And in both cases I felt a lot of similarities. For "The Old Man and the Sea" it seems obvious, but also in Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" I felt a somewhat similar cold style of writing, a kind of objective distance, to the atrocities of war.

But when Yossarian in Catch 22 drifts into more and more sarcasm and the story turns grotesque, Hemingway's American Frederic Henry is pushed by his own army into flight by the injustice of war. He leaves his foreign legion, the Italian army, and elopes with his love, Catherine, to Switzerland. But even then his evermore love seems somewhat distant, as if he would not trust himself to love without reserve. Only at the very end of the story, when emotions pile and the author shows the intimate thoughts and feelings of the protagonist, the reader perceives the trueness of Henry's personality. And there it really gets moving.

Moved — this book is not about choice. It shows how men and women are moved by fate like pawns and have to give in destiny. Some people discuss whether this book is an anti-war novel or not; I suppose it is, because by describing the bleakness of war is plainly enough to show the very senselessness of it. It is not necessary for Hemingway to write down his (or the protagonist's) lament of the political situation of fighting, it stands for itself. That is Hemingway for me.