Reading "A Farewell to Arms"

It was with slight nervousness that I decided to start reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I am almost always nervous doing whatever I do, and diving into this particular novel I was intimidated by the thoughts that my English was too limited I wouldn't understand the long phrases in the book. And then even if I got the words I might not get the meaning.

Ah. I see that I am not making any sense. So. Okay.

Reading the first few pages, I thought of those long days in elementary school when little was understood. I couldn't connect with the scene, the characters that Hemingway laid out. I tried harder to recognize details which made people attribute some kind of holy manliness to him - details that made him the epitome of everything manly.  As the novel was set in World War I, and the lead character was personally involved in it, of course there are scenes of bombings, wounded men, men dying in different sorts of circumstances.  The lead character witnessed deaths from up close, killed his subordinate for not obeying a command, was wounded himself, and was depicted as having no complaints about the whole ordeals.

What came into my mind was not that this lead character, Frederic Henry, was very manly, a strong man with a steel heart. Instead, I perceived him as distant, aloof.  He could manage to get over deaths, it seems, because he could distance himself from whatever happening around him. Or: is that being manly is all about?

Although there are certainly more than just one character in the novel, all of them sound almost identical.  Catherine Barkley, Frederic's girlfriend, sounds exactly like him that when the two converse I felt like reading a monologue.  But: this is Hemingway, who later went on as the winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction! And the Nobel prize for literature! I did find some of his sentences paint a deep emotion I can't really put a finger on.  For instance, Catherine mentions that she wants to have her hair cut short, and Frederic doesn't say a thing. Catherine then asks if he doesn't want her to have her hair cut and he chooses not to answer.  I recognized this as the strange characteristics that often accompany love: we sometime wish our lover would/would not do something, yet we refrain from expressing the wish because love gets in the way.

That particular scene might make Hemingway seem sexist, however an almost exactly same thing also happens with Frederic. He grows his beard because Catherine asks him to, and at times he thinks of getting rid of it. He keeps the beard however, because Catherine wants him to.

(Did I really just discuss about hair and beard, not insights about love and war and compassion and companionship depicted in the novel???)

All in all, I don't even know what genre this novel is in. Romance? Suspense? Thriller? Or gasp - Literary? It just doesn't fit in any category I can think of.

True, there are some worthy quotes from the novel which show Hemingway's brilliant observations of life. You can easily find them all over the internet. However, what I conclude from A Farewell to Arms are these:

(1) Intimidated as you may, no matter how limited your English is, just dive into that novel people make a big fuss about, and -
(2) You might find out that the Writer Other People Make A Big Fuss About didn't write brilliant dialogues with vivid characters - yet you can't deny the solid proof that he wrote something.

A writer writes. An age old mantra I long  to put to use for myself: a writer writes, no fuss, no excuses: A. Writer. Writes.