The sun rises and sets in "A Farewell to Arms;" the moon glows and dims. The days blur together with hardly a mention. Booze flows consistently. Emotions swell and fade.

Ernest Hemingway had a way of scrambling up the formulas in his breakthrough work, of taking something as black-and-white as war and presenting it as a gray fog of delirious boredom.

What struck me from page 1 was the book's tempo. It flies by, days ticking by, moments evaporating in front of our eyes.

There isn't much room here for focus or nostalgia. When our hero endures a battlefield injury, we hardly have time to process that he's even been wounded. It isn't until he realizes that he's being driven to a hospital while lying underneath a dying man that we realize something severe has happened.

Most war films, and war novels, present this kind of stuff in palpable, dramatic ways. But Hemingway's story was about people, not battle lines, and it's fascinating how the conflict seems relegated to the back row. When one has made friends with his fellow soldiers and his priest, when he looks forward all day to his nightly rendezvous with a beautiful nurse, when his mind is cheery thanks to vermouth and fine wine, the war seems like far too much of a downer to focus on.

But in hindsight, it's precisely because Hemingway doesn't milk its topic that "A Farewell to Arms" lingers in the imagination. He places the focus on characters, not their scenery, and consequently we are always aware of the lives being lived in the foreground, and the ways in which the war is looming over them, threatening to interrupt a love affair in progress.

Another writer would have played up the drama of the barracks, or set all of this action firmly within the context of the wider war games. But Hemingway, by turning his back on all that, made a rather profound decision to focus on the camaraderie and chemistry - on the things that really matter in life.

The only time the war becomes prominent is when it screws something up, obliterating a knee or separating two lovers. The war is the antithesis to the lives being lived in the fore. It is that which will not be named.

As the 2009 BIG READ draws closer to its end Nov. 15, what I take away most from this year's selection - not just as a reader but also as a writer - is that it's often what is not said that can matter most.

Hemingway's novel is about a great many things, but it's his reluctance to address the battlefield experience that truly speaks loudest. It implies that the violence is so opposed to human experience, so removed from what matters to us most, that the minds of soldiers drift instead to thoughts of friends, food, cocktails and lovers.

Hemingway's novel is a meditation on how to remain human in truly inhumane conditions.

As a masterpiece, it's bold precisely because it refuses to be bold. It tells a great story, with patience and subtlety, and makes its larger political and philosophical point by relegating certain topics and themes to the fringes. We fall in love with Henry and Catherine, but are always aware of just what it is that could destroy them both forever.

E-mail: SnyderReviews@hotmail.com