![]() There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. The plain was rich with crops there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Featuring Hemingway’s own 1948 introduction to an illustrated reissue of the novel, a personal foreword by the author’s son Patrick Hemingway, and a new introduction by the author’s grandson Seán Hemingway, this edition of A Farewell to Arms is truly a celebration.Ī Farewell to Arms 1 IN THE LATE SUMMER of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. This edition collects all of the alternative endings together for the first time, along with early drafts of other essential passages, offering new insight into Hemingway’s craft and creative process and the evolution of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield-weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion-this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep. Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.The definitive edition of the classic novel of love during wartime, featuring all of the alternate endings: “Fascinating…serves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an author’s process” ( The New York Times ). It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. If people bring so much courage to the world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. ![]() We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. “That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away all other things were unreal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |