One of Hemingway's enduring qualities is that he writes on the page the way his narrators would speak. The reading makes the listener want to sit and reflect on scenes and chapters. It is too dense a work for a single sitting. Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting? He did not resort to the stereotype caricatures that an inferior reader might have attempted in order to play to the gallery. In addition to Henry's narrative voice, I liked the way Slattery realised the Italian characters. Which character – as performed by John Slattery – was your favourite? The narrator, Frederic Henry, dominates the novel. I read the text alongside the audio and I thought Slattery's reading brought out tones and inflections I might have missed on the page. He negotiates the accents (American, Italian, English, Scottish, Swiss) convincingly. He gets the balance between the hard-bitten laconic tone of the narrative, from the terse war reflections to the suppressed pain at the end. John Slattery does a fine job narrating Hemingway's classic novel.
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As Mr Buckley later wrote, the outside world cared more for Spain's art works, spirited to safety in Geneva, than for its thousands of refugees.Would you consider the audio edition of A Farewell to Arms to be better than the print version? Implicit in this book is the thought that, if the correspondents had been listened to, the outcome could have been different. The story was tragic, not just as a prologue to the second world war but also because it condemned Spain to decades of dictatorship. The author paints a marvellous portrait of the world of the war correspondent: the risk to life the temptations to infidelity (Hemingway's affair with Martha Gellhorn was hardly exceptional) and, in the days before satellite phones, the constant struggle to get the story out. Another is an overlong chapter on the dispute between Hemingway and John Dos Passos on the disappearance of Dos Passos's friend, José Robles. One weakness of Mr Preston's book is his concentration on the English-language press (Koltsov apart, non-Anglophone journalists are mentioned mainly in passing). Fischer, writing mainly for the Nation, was not a spy, but he was so well-connected in both Europe and America that his advice was welcomed by American and Soviet politicians alike. He devotes a fascinating chapter to Russia's Mikhail Koltsov, a Pravda correspondent for whom Republican Spain was an inspiring antidote to the terror of his homeland-and whose loyalty to Stalin was rewarded by torture and execution. Mr Preston's own preference for the Republican cause is obvious, but it does not deter him from detailing the spying for their governments of several pro-Republic correspondents. Mr Preston notes that Carney invented many of his stories, which pro-Catholic editors at the New York Times printed despite the anguish of Herbert Matthews, its more objective correspondent on the Republican side. Some of these attacks were horrible enough others were exaggerated by Francoist sympathisers.
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Outside opinion was also offended by the anticlericalism of the Republican side, with its attacks on priests and vandalism of monasteries. So why did the reporting of so many pro-Republic correspondents not persuade outside powers, notably Britain, America and France, to lift their arms embargo on the hard-pressed Republicans? A prime reason was the fact that the Republicans were backed, more in materiel than men, by Stalin's Russia: an antipathy to communism was, it seems, a good enough excuse to overlook the presence in Franco's forces of German and Italian troops. On the Francoist side they were often threatened with prison and execution.
#A call to arms hemingway free
As Mr Preston explains, foreign correspondents were given relatively free rein by the Republicans' press office, with easy access to the front lines. Carney of the New York Times for special, scornful mention). By contrast, enthusiasts for Franco's rebels were few (Mr Preston singles out William P.
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“IN SPAIN two vast world forces are testing each other out: if Franco conquers, Europe will be black or Europe will go to war as soon as Hitler and Mussolini are ready.” That was the correct prediction in 1936 of Louis Fischer, an American journalist so convinced of the dangers of Franco's fascist rebellion that he joined the International Brigades to take up arms on behalf of the Republican government.įischer was hardly alone in his devotion to the Republican cause: in an excellent account of the foreign reporting of Spain's three years of savage fratricide, Paul Preston cites an impressive list, from America's egotistic Ernest Hemingway to Britain's self-effacing Henry Buckley.