Finished Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms

I have a backlog of books that I have read and want to write about.  I might as well start off by discussing a "classic": Ernest Hemingway's World War I story A Farewell to Arms.  Before getting into the story, I have to admit to a little bibliophobia about authors like Hemingway, Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck and Joseph Conrad.  When I earlier read books they had written, it wasn't for my own pleasure and enlightenment, but rather to fulfill high school English class assignments.  And part of those assignments, without exception, involved afterwards picking apart the assigned novels according to the criteria that the inevitably boring (to me) and disinterested (in me) teachers presented to us.  So I came to regard these greats in literature as something of an enemy, and this feeling sadly lasted well past the time I left that prison known as high school.

I have since still avoided Buck, Steinbeck, and Conrad, but did manage to read Hemingway's Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.  This novel read like a movie, and the ending was something I never forgot.  So I set out recently to read his "breakthrough" novel A Farewell to Arms, which is about an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian Army during World War I as they fought against Austria.  Part of the narrative is about his experiences in the ambulance corps there and part is about his romance with an English nurse.  The story in itself isn't really anything to get terribly excited about, but I was impressed with how the author developed the characters through extensive, intricate dialog.  Also, Hemingway's presentation always used simple, short sentences that, strung together, were very effective at describing not only the plot as it developed, but also the interesting setting in which it was placed.  The story and its underlying theme of victimization at the hands of the powers that be, presented in the first person by the protagonist, is about as gloomy and cynical is it comes, making me feel that this might be a good "Goth" novel for its bleakness and negativity.  Still, there was a kind of sweetness and friendly intimacy to how many of the characters related to each other that reminded me a little of Stephen King's Joyland, which I had just finished reading before picking up A Farewell to Arms.

When I was in high school, instead of being graded on a 0-4 scale, or even "F" to "A", we at my obnoxiously "special" school naturally had to do it differently, using a 0-9 scale instead...who knows why.  A "5" grade would correspond to "C-".  I say that because that's what I would expect my "wonderful" English teachers to give me for the above review...which incidentally is written in a manner to avoid giving the story away to potential readers...