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Classic Literature. Fiction. Literature. HTML:Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece on war, love, loyalty, and honor tells the story of Robert Jordan, an antifascist American fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight" and one of the foremost classics of war literature. For Whom the Bell Tolls tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades, is attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of a guerilla leader's last stand, Hemingway creates a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, For Whom the Bell Tolls stands as one of the best war novels ever written.… (more)
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I suppose his terse and sometimes overtly macho style rubs some people the wrong way, but I think the best of what he wrote is enduring. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is substantially longer than most of his other novels, but it contains the same motivating themes that mark his territory. Set against the backdrop of war, Hemingway challenges the reader to consider the value of devotion and commitment and, ultimately, sacrifice. This is great stuff and one of the best books ever written.
Not that it's a bad book - indeed, it's considered one of his finest. It covers four days in the war, during which the American protagonist Robert Jordan is assigned the task of blowing up a bridge in sync with a heavy assault on fascist positions. I've commented before that I think Hemingway was better at writing short stories than novels, and the best bits of writing in For Whom The Bell Tolls are vignettes: Pilar describing the systematic slaughter of the fascists in her village, Jordan recalling his father's suicide, the desparate last stand atop a hillside as a fellow band of partisans are ambushed.
It's stronger in the second half than the first, and while there are some great moments, I didn't absolutely love it. I think I like the idea of reading Hemingway more than actually doing so. Like Kurt Vonnegut, he's an author everybody else loves, but whom I don't quite seem to appreciate on the same level. I can appreciate his skill as an author, and he has several short stories I think are fantastic, but ultimately I rarely like his minimalist writing style. It works very well when describing moments of great emotional significance, but for everything else it's just dull to read. I prefer my prose to be carefully gilded, as evidenced by my favourite author being David Mitchell.
I've now moved on to reading Down And Out In Paris And London, by George Orwell, which is doing a better job of satisfying my desire to be inspired to a life of living abroad, even if it means taking crummy jobs and living on the poverty line. George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway were both expatriates in Paris in the 1920s and were both present at the Spanish Civil War; Hemingway as a journalist and Orwell as a combatant. And they were both internationally renowned authors by the 1950s. I wonder if they ever met?
Robert Jordan (not just Robert,
First off, the dialogue was frustrating to read. With so many thous and thees and thys you would've thought you were reading Shakespearian but actually the translation of Spanish to English translates better that way than to modern English, apparently. The problem is, it doesn't fit with the rest of the narrative. I don't know how else to explain it except it doesn't fit. Just reads wrong. The other thing about the writing style is that while it is written in the third person, the reader spends a lot of time in Robert Jordan's head. Which is not always an exciting place to be as he often argues with himself and goes off on crazy tangents that don't always feel relevant or crucial to the story. It's hard to stay interested.
I struggled to get into the story mainly because it felt like the point, the blowing up of the bridge, was so far away and without it there was so little to keep the plot moving. I also found it hard to connect with the characters - none of them really did anything for me. I wasn't at all moved by this book until the very end. At the end the imagery of Robert Jordan lying on the ground with his leg at an unnatural angle and with his submachine gun pointed at Lieutenant Berrard was just so vivid and so real in the my mind - if the whole novel was more like the last page, my rating would have been very different.
In each of the novels (The Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms being the other two) I've
This novel is set in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War, the idealogical precursor to the Fascist/Communist clash soon to come on the Eastern Front of World War II. The story primarily involves American Spanish professor and converted Republican partisan, Robert Jordan and the 72 hours he spends with an anti-fascist partisan force in the hours preceding a Republican offensive.
The characters crafted by Hemingway are fascinating, most specifically the partisan leaders Pablo and Pilar. The interaction between the rebels and with Jordan are spellbinding. The character of Pilar is especially haunting and her story of the execution of the fascists (a/k/a prominent citizens) in her small Spanish village is some of the best and most captivating writing I've ever read.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, this 470 page novel is about 100 pages too long, as it is interspersed with periods of inaction, punctuated by stream of consciousness meanderings, which admittedly many may find enjoyable.
Some may find the style of language irritating (Thee, Thou, Thy mother, etc.) but I found this to be a minor issue. More problematic to me is what I can only guess is the censorship (either self censorship in light of the times or editorial censorship) whereby all instances of profanity or coarse language is omitted and replaced by bizarre alternatives. For example, these beauties from the mouth of Pablo, "I obscenity in the milk of all," and "Go and obscenity thyself." I find it hard to believe that Hemingway actually wrote this, and if not (or even if he did), these bizarre omissions cannot be rectified.
Despite these minor complaints, this is an extremely educational piece of work, both from the standpoint of literature and for the insight it provides for an extremely important and interesting period of world history. Highly recommended.
Furthermore, we develop no affinity to any of the Spaniards. Relating to Spaniards is made much more difficult with Hemingway's chosen awkward too-literal translations. The Spanish speech patterns are littered with archaic pronouns: thee, thy, thou. Hemingway's prudish self-censorship, along with the literal translation of Spanish curses (that would be far better translated as a simple "Fuck you," or "Fuck your ________") also get in the way of seeing any of the characters as relatable. When the Spanish are angry in Hemingway's novel, they yell, "obscenity!" or "I obscenity in the milk of thy (whatever it is)!"
The relationship between Robert Jordan and his girlfriend Maria is bizarre and more like what Ernest Hemingway's fantasy woman would be. Even creepier than that, maybe. She wants to not only love Robert Jordan, she wants to be with him ALL of the time, be doing EVERYTHING he's doing, doing EVERYTHING for him, looking like him, and even BEING him. It's totally off-putting for me as a reader.
Totally meh.
Hemingway manages to build tension around a planned military assault in such a way I found myself caring about
It is very tempting to read the differences in these two novels as representing the zeitgeists of their respective wars: in the Spanish Civil War of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the characters still believe that they are fighting for an ideal, that their actions, however horrific, can have an important and lasting effect on the country and the world. Concepts like "freedom" and "The Republic" are bandied about with un-ironic conviction, and romantic love is a saving force, even if cut short. When characters are thrown into doubt, despair, or fear, which happens frequently, they pull themselves out of it with some brusque self-talk about the ideals of the Republic. Even when they do things in the name of their cause of which they are later ashamed (as in Pilar's gruesome description of a mob massacre in her small town of origin), that shame is largely kept separate from the untarnished ideals for which they are fighting.
In the late Cold War Britain of Le Carré, on the other hand, any idealism has faded into a memory so distant and exhausting that it's not even nostalgic anymore. The characters perform their actions out of habit, and out of an idea that they have spent too long spooking around for "The Circus" to think of changing now. From a moral perspective East and West are largely indistinguishable, so tasks like ferreting out a Russian mole are performed by exhausted career spies as a matter of course, rather than by fiery young ideologues in a lather of righteous indignation. There are a plethora of scenes where the protagonist, George Smiley, does nothing but sit in a room sifting through files. Even the suspenseful scenes, especially the final apprehension of the mole, are laden with exhaustion and disappointment, yet performed with the careful attention born of long habit. And Le Carré probably has a point: if I had a tricky job I wanted done, I would recruit George Smiley over Robert Jordan any day.
For most people, the primary associations with "Hemingway hero" are of succinct expression, "the thing left unsaid," a character emotionally reserved to the point of inaccessibility. Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Bell, certainly thinks of himself this way: he's forever treading his precarious way among the "wrong" thoughts, reminding himself which subjects are safe to dwell on and which will put him in a mindset ill-suited to his task of blowing up a bridge. He warns himself against getting too attached to the people with whom he's working, but also against getting too angry at them. He calls himself on starting to romanticize the Spanish people, but also stops himself from descending into cynicism. He struggles to maintain that crisp, taut surface of clean action and minimal thought that is the salvation of the Hemingway protagonist; at one point he even claims that his "mind is in suspension until the war is over." Nevertheless, he thinks a lot, and some of those thoughts are downright paeans to the cause of Spanish Republicanism:
In all the work that they, the partizans did, they brought added danger and bad luck to the people that sheltered them and worked with them. For what? So that, eventually, there should be no more danger and so that the country should be a good place to live in. That was true no matter how trite it sounded.
If the Republic lost it would be impossible for those who believed in it to live in Spain.
So much of the poignancy of For Whom the Bell Tolls comes from thoughts like these: thoughts of how things will be when the war (or even the specific action) is over and life can return to normal. Wartime experiences, as well as dreams and memories of better times, are made more vibrant by the palpable abnormality of living in a guerrilla band in the pine forest, behind fascist lines. At some point in the novel, every character indulges in dreams of a more leisurely existence, full of the mundane but achingly evocative details of everyday life: sleeping late with a lover, raising fowl in the backyard, conversing in a bar, eating wine and cheese in a rented room in Madrid. Because odds are stacked against any of the characters achieving these modest dreams, the scenes of nostalgia can be heart-wrenching, although I thought Hemingway does a good job of not getting too maudlin about them or dwelling on them too much.
In Tinker, Tailor, the poignancy comes from quite a different source: the Cold War has been going on for so long, and permeated so far into the characters' psyches, that they no longer expend any imagination on what life would be like if it were over. They don't have the luxury of keeping their minds "suspended" for the duration of the war; they have no "normal" lives outside their profession. In fact, despite the thawing of Russian/British relations during the novel's timeframe, the idea of escaping from a Cold War mentality never seems to enter the characters' heads, except insofar as it means they will have spent an entire career in service only to be left behind when they're no longer useful. The saddest scene in the novel, for my money, involves Smiley visiting Connie Sachs, an old colleage who has been fired, supposedly for losing her sense of perspective, and told to spend some time "in the real world." Connie, descended into bloated alcoholism, sobs to Smiley that "I hate the real world. I like the Circus and all my lovely boys," while he, overcoming his sense of revulsion, reluctantly holds her hand. It's vastly darker than anything in For Whom the Bell Tolls, as far as I'm concerned. The Circus has come to exist, for these characters, as an end in itself, not a tool to create a better world.
The atmosphere of Tinker, Tailor was so dark, in fact, that getting through it occasionally felt like the same moral slog facing its characters. It's a testament to Le Carré's writing that it felt like that infrequently, just as it's a testament to Hemingway's prose that For Whom the Bell Tolls doesn't come off as a complete romanticization of the doomed-but-noble battle. The first book was full of lovely lines in the midst of pleasingly workhorse jargon (my favorite was Smiley's description of an interrogation: one should "learn the facts, then try on the stories like clothes"); the second was the classic, bone-taut style that made its author a household name. As it's really style and quality of prose that make or break a book for me, these were both winners. I don't think I'll be reading much war fiction for a while, though. A little goes a long way, even if they're such lovingly constructed and realized narratives as these.
Jordan is a dynamiter who had been sent to blow up a bridge.
With the men who make up the freedom fighters a man named Pablo appears to be
Amidst the talk of killing, we follow Robert and a young woman named Maria who are drawn to each other. This mixture of love and war is a significant juxtaposition used by the author. With the tender moments of these two characters it is as though this may be one thing the guerrillas are fighting for. The government's totalarism attitude cannot tell them what to do and that gypsies like Rafael, foreigners like the American Jordan and women like Pilar and Maria can all work and live together as equals.
Hemingway is a master of dialogue. We don't just read the words but are transported to the Spanish mountainside and are listening to the scenes such as Pilar and Pablo discussing a matador that Pablo had seen.
The story mixes historical fact and speculative fiction in a most entertaining manner. The reader will feel that they have read a work of extroardinary literary significance in this novel.
Good question.
To be fair, For Whom the Bell Tolls isn't ALL about horrors. It even has some pleasant moments. But ultimately, it's about the selfless nature of
But Hemingway's portrayal of this theme is quite powerful. He isn't always consistent, but he is about as consistent as it is possible to be about such a theme and much more so than most, which is of great artistic value.
It's also generally very well written, much more so than (and something of a relief after reading) a lot of faux-Hemingway like John Steinbeck or Cormac McCarthy. And I thought this was much better than the only other Hemingway I've read, A Farewell to Arms. But there are a few passages that miss the mark, such as this almost comically bad sex scene: "...They were having now and before and always and now and now and now. Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now. Come now, now, for there is no now but now. Yes, now. Now, please now, only now, not anything else only this now, and where are you and where am I and where is the other one, and not why, not ever why, only this now; and on and always please then always now, always now, for now always one now; one only one, there is no other one but one now, one, going now, rising now, sailing now, leaving now, wheeling now, soaring now, away now, all the way now, all of all the way now; one and one is one, is one, is one, is one, is still one, is still one, is one descendingly, is one softly, is one longingly, is one kindly, is one happily, is one in goodness, is one to cherish, is one now..." blah blah blah.
The mind-numbing repetitiousness of this "description" (if one can call it that) is especially unfortunate as it echoes another passage just a few pages earlier which is intended to have quite a different feel: "...muck this whole treacherous muckfaced mucking country and every mucking Spaniard in it on either side and to hell forever. Muck them to hell together, Largo, Prieto, Asensio, Miaja, Rojo, all of them. Muck every one of them to death to hell. Muck the whole treachery-ridden country. Muck their egotism and their selfishness and their selfishness and their egotism and their conceit and their treachery. Muck them to hell and always. Muck them before we die for them. Muck them after we die for them. Muck them to death and hell..." It goes on like this at some length.
But in the end, Hemingway affirms that there are "pleasant things to speak of": "That is in Madrid. Just over the hills there, and down across the plain. Down out of the gray rocks and the pines, the heather and the gorse, across the yellow high plateau you see it rising white and beautiful. That part is just as true as Pilar's old women drinking the blood down at the slaughterhouse. There's no one thing that's true. It's all true. The way the planes are beautiful whether they are ours or theirs." But the horrors win out in the end: "The hell they are, he thought."
The politics were well
ok. got that said. Now, about the book.
I was
But what about the story? What about the naive volunteer trying his best to be a good soldier for a cause he thinks he believes in, in spite of what we know about the errors and excesses of that cause? The partisan band in the hills, trying to say alive so that they can go back to being farmers and vintners, each one delineated as a distinct person with frailties and honor in unique proportion? And the honesty of the brutality on both sides of this gruesome war, the ineptitude and cynicism of the commanders, the pain of both dying and killing, and the fatalism war can engender.
The intense writing made me see everything as if through a close-up lens. Although the language can seem moderately straightforward (and no, it's not all simple declarative sentences by any means), I had to slow down to capture the vivid detail, even when I wanted to story to move faster because the tension mounts even though the inevitability of the outcome seems clearer every step of the way.
Bad grammar, bad usage can pull me right out of a mediocre story, but nothing could pull me out of this one.
The story is tiny - a guerilla movement in the Spanish
Hemingway spends a great deal of time inside his character's heads, repetitively showing us their thoughts and motivations. The dialogue tends to plod along, filled with 'thees' and 'thous' and odd phrases such as:
"Go and obscenity thyself," Pablo told him. -From For Whom The Bell Tolls, page 211-
I found myself tempted to scan through large portions of the book during the early going, and only hard-nosed determination kept me reading.
Luckily, the book redeems itself around page 270, when finally the reader gets to experience some action. It is the latter pages that Hemingway shows his skill as a writer, painting the tragedy of war in broad strokes and revealing the humanity of his characters.
I wanted badly to love this book. I have enjoyed other Hemingway novels (The Old Man and The Sea, for example), and have been captivated by Hemingway's short stories. But, I'm afraid I cannot recommend this one. Had I not been reading this for a challenge and a group read, I would have quit less than 50 pages in. If the reader is diligent and can wade through the dryness of the first half of the book, they will be tragically rewarded in the end.
This book definitely involves the theme of a hero. Roberto meets the guerrilla troops in the mountains and subtlety but rather quickly takes command. He unifies the people to complete a task for the Republic. Roberto upholds his duty to his country even at the cost of his life. He embodies a classic hero.
I think that this novel is very well written. It is written as if Robert, who is English, is translating the Spanish language back into writing and therefore makes the language barrier between him and the others very real. This book was a little dull at some points but I still found it to be a good read. I recommend it to anyone who liked A Farewell to Arms.