A farewell to Arms

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Ernst Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor, and the family which was quite big consisted of six children.
They lived in Oak Park a Chicago suburb. Ernst became a cub reporter for Kansas City Star in 1917, and the following year he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. He became badly wounded but was twice decorated for his services. He returned to US in 1919 and married 1921. The next three years he worked as a war-journalist, but then he settled in Paris and started to write fiction.
Hemingway’s first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time, but The Torrents of Spring, which was a satirical novel, established his name more widely. The international reputation became secured by the next three books: Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms.
Hemingway visited Spain during the civil war and the experiences were described in his bestseller From Whom the Bell Tolls.
He had a direct and deceptively simple way of writing, which spawned generations of imitators, but no equals. 1954 he was awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature, followed by the publication of The old man and the sea. Ernst Hemingway died in 1961.

A Farewell to Arms is about Henry, a young American who joins the Italian army as an ambulance driver, during the First World War.
Henry meets a young English nurse, Catherine. When Henry gets wounded he is sent to Milan, where she takes care of him, and they fall in love.
They are extremely happy together for about half a year, when Henry is recovered and sent back to the front, just after she has told him that she is pregnant.
At the front, everything goes wrong, his friends dies and he is being arrested for no reason. Henry manages to flee; if he had stayed he would have been killed, and now he is a criminal for real. He spends some hard time in the bush, but manages to get on a train back to Milan.
Unfortunately, Catherine has left the town for a little vacation to a town called Streza, just by the Swiss border. Henry goes after her, they spend some happy days together, but the police are after them and they flee to Switzerland.
In Switzerland they live in a cabbage near Montreux for a couple of months, but the hospital is situated in Lausanne, so the move there when it is time for Catherine to give birth. In the beginning, when Catherine is about to give birth everything is alright, but then the baby won’t come out. The Doctors decides to make a caesarean so that both the mother and the baby will survive. But the baby is dead, and to make it even worse, Catherine gets Haemorrhages. Henry prays to God, but it does not help, and Catherine dies.

I think this book is a classic because it has been read by so many, during a long time, and it is still popular. It is a classic story of love and war. It is also a bit different, because Henry is not the ordinary hero, he runs away from the army, and the end is not a happy one without any kind of hope. I would say that’s the message of this novel is that war is useless and a lot of great people dies for no good reason.
The book was a bit dull in the beginning, but then, when I came to the second part of the book, things started to happen. It is written in a quite modern language so it was not so hard to read it in that way.
The best parts in this novel, according to me are the dialogues, especially the ones between Henry and Catherine. They are funny, and it feels as you are standing next to them listening to this love couple, who are crazy about each other. It is so...