A Farewell To Arms

My New Years resolution is to read more of the classic literature I've somehow missed.  Starting off with my book club we read Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms (#1,193).  I know after reading it that I will never, ever be a Hemingway fan.  I saw that it was an NEA Big Read selection, and their intro to the book says "it would be hard to find a more tender or rapturous love story than A Farewell To Arms."  I certainly beg to differ.  

If you've never read it either, the plot boils down to an American who drives an ambulance for the Italian army during World War I who meets a British nurse. The war is going badly for the Italians, and Frederic is wounded.  After convalescing from a mortar shell wound in Milan, where Catherine has come to nurse him, the pair wind up escaping to Switzerland after a disastrous Italian Army retreat from the Alps.  Theirs is not to be a happy ending, however.

When Hemingway is describing the action of the war - his work driving the ambulances through the treacherous countryside, the chaos of the Italian retreat from the Alps, the couple's efforts to find a safe haven, it's easy to become engrossed in the book.  But the central part of the plot is the relationship between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley.  Personally, I don't think Hemingway could possibly make his female characters sound more stupid or wooden.  I think calling Catherine one-dimensional is way too generous.  The only reason their relationship goes behind simple sexual satisfaction for Frederic is that when he is wounded, he attaches to Catherine like a limpet, just as Hemingway did with his nurse in WWI in real life.  She's pregnant, but so what?  Frederic has absolutely no attachment to the child, nor is he upset when it dies.  In fact, he resents the fact that the child killed his mother.  So out into the rain he walks, and life rolls on as long as grandfather keeps sending those generous checks every month.

I didn't find either of the main characters admirable.  They did not act out of moral conviction.  Events just sort of happened to Frederic.  I suppose some see this attitude towards life freeing, but it's just not my cup of tea.  Oh, and did I mention that I absolutely hated the cover on the edition I read?  It's surprising to me that on this brutalist cover that it is Catherine who fills the foreground, not Frederic.  Why is that?  I'll consider this my own Farewell To Hemingway.