A Farewell to Arms

So I finished Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (a few days ago, but it's been crazy busy, especially now that we're winning gold medals left and right at the Olympics and everyone is glued to the TV). It was not the first Hemingway I'd ever read, we had " Hills like White Elephants" and another weird story set in Africa that I can't remember the name of, but it was the first full-length novel. As with all the other 'classics' I've been reading recently, it took me quite a while to get through. Much longer than I would have anticipated from the very small and very thin book.
I already knew how it ends because I'd seen Silver Linings Playbook in which Bradley Cooper throws the book through a window because he is dissatisfied with the ending. I won't give it away, but I can tell you that from the first page you will already have the inkling that this won't be a fairytale happy ending. And it isn't.
Anyway, the novel, or more specifically the plot, reminded me of two things: Roald Dahl's short stories and Ian McEwan's Atonement. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Roald Dahl wrote several short stories based on his experience as an RAF pilot in the Second World War, and Hemingway based his novel on his own experiences in the Italian campaign in the First. You can somehow get from their writing that what they're describing is something they know about, something they've experienced themselves. I'm not saying this makes it more realistic, but there is a rawness to it that can make it less smooth to read. That idea actually makes it interesting to compare it with McEwan's novel, as he (as far as I know) has no experience of active service, but the part in which Hemingway describes the retreat, the long line of stalling vehicles and the enemy planes flying above, was very familiar. Atonement was of course written long after A Farewell to Arms, so if anyone is copying it was McEwan, but as I read Atonement first (and several times) it works the other way around in my head.
Even apart from these literary connections I thought the novel very good, and it is probably a good idea to (re)read such novels now that the First World War is exactly 100 years behind us, and there is tension building on all sides in the world.

After finishing the classic I went on to a contemporary novel, Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid (his first novel of the three he has written so far; I've already mentioned his novel How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, if you still haven't read any of his work you definitely should). The only connection Moth Smoke could have to A Farewell to Arms is that they're both written in the first-person narrator, and that narrator is a man. Otherwise, they're completely different. Which is exactly what I need, after such a classic heavy tome.