** spoiler alert ** As with most Hemingway, I find it hard to articulate what makes A Farewell to Arms so great. It is aboslutely exilirating. It is a simple story of a love affair between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley during World War I, but Hemingway's characteristic spare style and first person narration give it enormous immediacy and power.

The first time I read A Farewell to Arms I was struck by two moments in which Lt. Henry walks away from what had been his life. The first comes in the third (of five) book. Henry, an American ambulance driver in the Italian army, has been swept up in the rout of Caporetto. He comes to a checkpoint where rear echelon troops are shooting all officers not with their units for desertion. He escapes and declares himself through with the Italians. The second moment closes the book. After Catherine and their child have died during childbirth, Henry walks out of the hospital into the rain. Both are wonderfully bleak and reflect disillusionment with the world.

On reading the book a second time, I came to appreciate the beauty of the smaller scenes in the book. One that particularly sticks with me is Henry's game of billiards with Count Greffi, a cosmopolitan aristocrat much older than the Italian state he now serves. They talk about death, the war, and the supposed wisdom of the old. Greffi is relates his disappointment that old age has brought only cynicism. He had been led to expect wisdom and faith, but finds life just as mysterious and God just as distant as he did when he was young.

I have focused on what some might call the more depressing aspects of the book, but Hemingway's prose also delivers the beauty of life's simple pleasures. Life, in A Farewell to Arms is both beautiful and terrible.