For Whom the Bell Tolls

Barry Pierce

Rating: really liked it
'Robert Jordan sits on the pine needle floor of the pine forest, the scent of pine drifting through the pine trees which surround him. Gazing through the pines he sees a mountain which reminds him of a breast. It is domed, like a breast, but without a nipple, unlike a breast. The breastness of the mountain is superb. If only it was covered in pine needles and pine trees and had the scent of pine wafting around it. Then Robert would truly be happy.'

For Whom the Bell Tolls is allegedly a novel by Ernest Hemingway. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it is a story about an American dynamiter who is attempting to blow up a bridge in order to counteract Franco's forces.

Our main character, Robert Jordan, who is essentially a bad haircut personified, might win the title of 'most boring protagonist to ever appear in print'. Robert spends most of his time sitting on the forest floor and thinking about breasts. Poor Robert, his life really stinks! When he isn't thinking about boobs, he goes off on fifty-page long flashbacks to his life before the war when he was a young American in Madrid, cornering young girls at house parties and telling them how Kid A is actually the connoisseurs' choice when it comes to Radiohead albums but he has a soft spot for Pablo Honey.

What Robert needs is a feminine foil. A woman who can really stand-up to him and someone the reader can truly get behind. So Papa Hemingway shits out Maria, a woman so badly written that the only thing I can remember about her is that her nipples point upwards. Possibly the most lamentable aspect of Maria's character is the fact that she was raped by a group of fascists, a tragic backstory that Hemingway glosses over into order to talk about what a fantastic rack she has.

Hemingway's prose has always been an easy target. I would never, ever stoop so low. In fact, I will say thank god for Hemingway's prose! If For Whom the Bell Tolls was actually written at a literacy level higher than that of a kindergartener then it would genuinely be unreadable. On top of that, Hemingway makes the frankly strange decision to self-censor all of the obscenities throughout the novel. 'What the fuck' becomes 'what the muck' and so on. Hilariously, he also often substitutes obscenities with the word 'obscenity'. So there are genuinely moments in this novel where characters say 'what the obscenity are you doing?' and 'go obscenity yourself'.

My advice to all of you is to stay well away from this mess. There's nothing to see here folks. If you are interested in a book on the Spanish Civil War, read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. If you want a good book about a bridge, and hey who doesn't, read Willa Cather's Alexander's Bridge. God, for whom the bell tolls? It tolls for me.

Tom

Rating: really liked it
Ok, before I commit the sacrilege of dismissing this "classic," permit me to establish my Hemingway bona fides: I have read and loved just about everything else he wrote, and have taught Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, and many short stories, and had a blast doing it. I've read Carlos Baker's classic bio, and numerous critical articles on H. I've made the pilgrimage to Key West and taken pictures of his study and the hordes of 6-toed cats. I dig Papa, ok?

But I can not stand this book! I should say up front that I've never been able to tolerate it long enough to finish it -- twice. First time was nearly 30 years ago, and as a fairly recently discharged Army troop,I took up this book with much anticipation and excitement. I couldn't get past about half way through. I found the prose so incredibly flat and dull as to be soporific (and, yes, I fully understand and appreciate H's famous "Iceberg Principle" of writing -- "the thing left unsaid" etc). The problem wasn't the "thing left unsaid;" the problem was too many things said, and in a very boring fashion. How could a book with such a dramatic plot be so dull, I wondered in shock? It's all in the language, or lack thereof. I have a theory that great short story writers often don't make great, or even good, novelists, because the voice and style that works so well in the shorter genre just doesn't translate to the longer one (John Cheever, case in point; IB Singer, to a lesser extent). Now, of course, H. did write great novels; this just isn't one of them. Take away the language in H's novels, and what are you left with -- borderline juvenile adventures and fantasies, or at best, semi-journalistic accounts.

Compare the opening of Bells with the opening of Farewell to Arms: be honest and tell me if you hear even one faint echo of the magical rhythm of that famous opening in Bells -- anywhere, not just the beginning? And the dialogue, sweet jesus, joseph and mary, I've heard corporate phone recordings with more intonation and human warmth.

A few months ago, our book club selected this novel. At first, I kept my opinions to myself and hoped I would have a different response reading this time. I readily acknowledge that my reading tastes have evolved -- matured, I hope -- significantly over the years, and maybe I just had a tin ear 30 years ago. Not the case. I couldn't even get beyond the first 6 pgs this time. That flat voice was duller than ever! "Waterboarding would be more tolerable than reading 400+ pages of this stuff," I thought. I've choked down some mediocre books before for the sake of fulfilling my civic duty as a long-standing member of our book club, but I couldn't do it this time.

This is not to suggest that the rest of you are wrong. I have a dear friend who's read more great literature than I can remember, and he loves this book, and expresses great shock when I tell him how much I hate it. But there it is.

Jeffrey Keeten

Rating: really liked it
”No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
----------John Donne


Robert Capa’s iconic 1936 photo of a falling soldier.

Between 1936-1939 a war happened in Spain. The world refers to it as the Spanish Civil War, but to the citizens of Spain it is called The Civil War. It was a war for control of the soul of a country. It was fought between the Republicans, who were democratically elected and the Nationalists, a Fascist group wanting to overthrow the government. Most people were not aware at the time, but really this Civil War was a precursor, a warming pan for World War Two. The Soviet Union and a coalition of other future allies who stayed behind the scenes provided help and advice for the Republicans. Germany and Italy provided support for the Nationalists. There were international brigades formed up of volunteers from all over the world who came to Spain to fight against fascism.

They lost.

Francisco Franco, leader of the Nationalists, was the dictator of Spain until his death in 1975.

Ernest Hemingway went to Spain as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and was hoping to find some great material for a book. The dialogue is written in an archaic style implying that it is the most correct translation from the Spanish. The thees and thous are distracting and certainly added some ponderousness to a book that was set in the 1930s not the 1630s.


Hemingway in Spain.

Robert Jordan is an American who has been trained to be a dynamiter. He joins a band of gypsy freedom fighters up in the hills of Sierra de Guadarrama with orders to blow a bridge that may or may not be important. The chances of survival are slender because they are too few and the timeline too tight. He meets Maria who has been saved by the band from the Fascists who had tortured and raped her.

He falls head over heels in love.

“I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always though I have never seen you before.”

It could be the added tension of facing certain death coupled with her very real vulnerability that made him protective and lustful for her. Their relationship quickly goes medieval with her begging him for ways to help him: shining his shoes, pouring him wine, mending his clothes, or fetching him something to eat. She is constantly insecure about her appearance because the Fascists had cut off her hair and she only had a stubble grown back. The relationship is built on the most shallow grounds. It is difficult to conceive that it would have survived a move back into a regular life.

“But did thee feel the earth move?”

I’m not sure if this is where the concept of sex being cosmic originated, but it certainly provided some eye rolling moments for this reader. Especially when the gypsy witch Pilar tells Maria that she will only feel the earth move three times in her lifetime.

Why three times?

It is not known, but Pilar is most certain it can only happen three times.


There is a 1943 movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper.

Jordan’s relationship with the rest of the band is one of uncertainty and shifting alliances. He certainly is stepping on the toes of the original leader Pablo who used to be a man of great courage, but had lost his desire to want to kill or be killed. He is considered a coward or in my opinion maybe he’d just had his belly full of it. He commits an act of treason in an attempt to save the band, but decides in the final moment to come back and help. In some ways he is the most interesting character in the book. A man who is evolved past mindlessness and wants more reason for blowing a bridge or killing people than just to follow orders.

The best scene in the book is the death of a band of guerrillas who are lead by El Sordo. They are trapped on a hill by the Nationalists and it is some of the most compelling writing in the book as the action shifts between Jordan’s band who want to help, but know it is suicide to help, and the band on the hill wondering if help will arrive. Courage is something Hemingway respects and cowardice is something he worries about. The potential of experiencing his own bout of cowardice or finding it in others is a theme of his life.

Jordan’s father had committed suicide, an act of cowardice as far as Jordan was concerned. He is worried that he will be captured and would be forced to kill himself like his father. It puts into question his whole feelings about his father and the way he died. I found myself wincing as I was reading these passages seeing Hemingway’s own mind so glaringly revealed. Hemingway's father killed himself, as did his sister and brother. The curse continued into another generation with the suicide of his granddaughter Margaux. If Hemingway felt the way Jordan did (I believe he did.) I do wonder if he finally forgave his own father when he became the mechanism of his own death or did he maybe blame his father for cursing the family with suicidal thoughts?


Hemingway posing with his favorite shogun. Later he used it to end his life.

I read this book as a teenager and was suitably impressed with Hemingway at the time. I’d read The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and enjoyed them. I approached For Whom the Bell Tolls convinced I would love it as well. Rereading it now, at this point in my life was a struggle. The story is actually very simple, but this is a book that has fallen in a barrel of water and been bloated beyond recognition. Hemingway is famous for his concise sentences and for the precision of his plots, but in this novel he certainly moves away from both of those concepts. There is a wonderful short novel here hidden behind too much ink. The plot actually becomes tedious and repetitive. Words I thought I would never use to describe a Hemingway novel. I can’t begin to convey how disappointed I felt. It makes me fearful to read others of his books that I have such fine memories of reading.

This book was very popular and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
(Book 587 from 1001 books) - For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War.

As a dynamiter, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia. The novel is regarded as one of Hemingway's best works, along with The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and A Farewell to Arms.

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «زنگها برای که به صدا درمی‌آیند»؛ «ناقوس برای که به صدا در می‌آید»؛ «ناقوس عزا برای که می‌زند»؛ نویسنده: ارنست همینگوی، تاریخ نخستین خوانش: در ماه آگوست سال 1976میلادی

عنوان: زنگها برای که به صدا درمی‌آیند؛ نویسنده: ارنست همینگوی، مترجم: رحیم نامور، تهران، صفی علیشاه، 1329، در 280ص، چاپ دیگر تهران، کتابهای جیبی، 1342، در 315ص، چاپ چهارم 1345، در 325ص، چاپ دیگر صفیعلیشاه، 1367، چاپ دیگر تهران، نگاه، در 360ص، شابک9643513939؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، امیرکبیر، چاپ اول 1389، چاپ پنجم 1392، در 364ص، شابک 9789640013267؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان فرانسه - تاریخ جنگهای داخلی اسپانیا از سال 1936میلادی تا سال 1939میلادی - سده 20م

مترجم: علی سلیمی؛ تهران، سکه، 1350، در 585ص، چاپ دیگر تهران، پیروز، 1362؛ در 585ص؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، جامی، 1389، در488ص، چاپ دوم 1393؛ شابک 9789642575930؛

مترجم: عنایت الله شکیبا پور، تهران، دنیای کتاب، 1396، در 416ص، شابک 9789643463694؛

عنوان: ناقوس برای که به صدا درمی‌آید؛ نویسنده: ارنست همینگوی، مترجم: کیومرث پارسای، تهران، ناژ، 1394، در 484ص، شابک9786006110103؛

عنوان: ناقوس عزا برای که می‌زند؛ نویسنده: ارنست همینگوی، مترجم: پرویز شهدی، تهران، افکار جدید، 1396، در 656ص، شابک9786009862863؛ ترجمه از متن فرانسه

این رمان روایت داستان «رابرت جوردن»، سرباز «آمریکایی» است، که در میانه ی جنگ‌های داخلی «اسپانیا» به بریگاد بین‌المللی پیوسته‌ است؛ وی به‌ عنوان متخصص مواد منفجره، وظیفه دارد، پلی را که بر سر راه دشمن قرار دارد، منفجر کند؛ «جفری مایر»، نویسنده ی «زندگی‌نامهٔ همینگوی»، باور دارد، که این اثر یکی از بهترین آثار «همینگوی»، در کنار «پیرمرد و دریا»، «وداع با اسلحه»، و «خورشید هم طلوع می‌کند»، است؛ سراینده ی صلح، در جایی گفته «وقتی دیگران حرف میزنند، مردمان خوب گوش نمیکنند، راستی زنگها برای که به صدا درمیآیند»؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 17/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 18/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Matt

Rating: really liked it
“If we can win here, we can win everywhere...the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, and I hate very much to leave it...”
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

One of my favorite subgenres of literature is the people-on-a-mission story. If you have a collection of disparate individuals, each with a specific set of skills, and if they have to do something really hard and dangerous, preferably involving the destruction of a bridge, I am absolutely there. I’m not quite sure, but this affinity may have started when I first watched The Bridge on the River Kwai with my dad. Ever since, I have been a sucker for tales involving men and women who have a one-way ticket with destiny.

Thus, it’s no surprise that I loved Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Though positioned as a “classic,” it is really just a gussied-up action-adventure novel about a fella trying to disrupt a chasm-spanning structure with a little well-placed trinitrotoluene. Adhering to the typical tropes, he even has time to fall in love, before his deadly rendezvous.

The fella, in this case, is Robert Jordan, an American fighting against the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. This understudied conflict – which began in 1936 – served as a prelude to the Second World War, and became a proxy for the competing ideologies of communism and fascism. As such, it drew journalists and volunteers from all over the world. One of those journalists was Hemingway himself, who went to Spain to cover the conflict, and developed a sympathy for the Republican cause.

This sympathy is on full display in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which begins with young Robert lying on his stomach, listening to the wind in the pines as he surveys the bridge that he is slated to destroy. To complete his task, Robert joins a group of partisans, meeting three central characters: Pablo, Pilar, and Maria.

Pablo is the leader, but he is aging, selfish, and on the verge of betraying the Republic. Pilar is his wife, and the true leader of the band. Though Hemingway is not particularly known for his fully-realized female characters, Pilar steals every scene of which she is a part. Shrewd, mystical, and manipulative, she is the glue holding the band together, and also the conductor setting everything in motion. Finally, there is Marie, a beautiful young girl who was raped by the fascists and had her hair shorn off. Despite his lethal assignment, Robert finds time to fall in love with Maria, even as the clock ticktocks towards eternity.

***

Hemingway is an author whose reputation definitely precedes him. Even if you’ve never read one of his novels, you’ve probably seen his style parodied: the taut, terse prose; his this-then-that manner of storytelling; and his offbeat grammatical structures that make you think you are reading an English translation, rather than a book written in English.

All those things – along with Hemingway’s penchant for exploring men being men – is certainly on display here. But you also see that the “simplicity” with which he writes is deceptive. For instance, many of his short, punctual sentences are adding up to something, such as this breathlessly long passage of Robert and Maria spending some alone-time together:

Then there was the smell of the heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red, from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

It is writing like this that puts For Whom the Bell Tolls into a different realm. By way of plot, this could have been written by Jack Higgins or Alistair Maclean. Hemingway’s undeniable talent gives this potboiler a high literary gloss.

***

Don’t let that gloss fool you, though. This is a fun read. Of the Hemingway novels I’ve read, this is the most purely enjoyable. It mixes together a lot of dependable elements, such as hopeless love; the debate over pragmatism versus principle; and some pretty solid action scenes, given the Hemingway treatment, as in the famous hilltop stand of the partisan El Sordo:

When the shooting had started he had clapped [his] helmet on his head so hard it banged his head as though he had been hit with a casserole and, in the last lung-aching, leg-dead, mouth-dry, bullet-spatting, bullet-cracking, bullet-singing run up the final slope of the hill after his horse was killed, the helmet had seemed to weigh a great amount and to ring his bursting forehead with an iron band. But he had kept it. Now he dug with it in a steady, almost machinelike desperation. He had not yet been hit…

I appreciate imagery in my fiction. I like having scenes described. Hemingway does this as well as anyone. He puts you right there.

***

This is a book I first read when I was a freshman in college. I’ll be the first to admit that this was not exactly the most clearheaded period of my life. My emotional lability was like a metronome on a ship in a hurricane. The highs were high, the lows were low. Every defeat was like Waterloo, and so was every victory. Each new love was like the world’s first. It was in this mind-muddled context that I first discovered Robert, Maria, and Pilar, and their mission to de-bridge a gorge. I would be lying if I did not say that my fevered, volatile self firmly embraced Robert’s romantic fatalism:

[W]hen I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that nor thought that it could happen. So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise…

Of course, I am no longer in college, no longer that young, and – thankfully – at least a bit more stable, though that is relative. Thus, it was interesting to reassess For Whom the Bell Tolls with emotions that are a bit less raging. I have long classed this among my all-time favorite books, but I’m not certain that would be the case if I read this for the first time today.

With that said, there is still a fundamental power in this novel that is undeniable. The cinematic quality of the set pieces still holds up. So does the way that Hemingway marvelously captures the tensions between youth and experience, between choosing causes and choosing people, between what is worth dying for, and for what is worth living.

Also, there is a bridge that needs to be blown up, and that’s the kind of saga that never goes out of style.

Peter

Rating: really liked it
This was the first full length novel by Hemingway I read and what a story it was! Romance, war scenes, behind the enemy line action. Written in Hemingway's unimitable prose I really enjoyed this story set in Spain. It's a very philosophical novel too. Absolutely recommended to every reader. It's a modern classic!

stew

Rating: really liked it
I obscenity your transmission. I obscenity in the milk of your ancestors. I, and always and forever I; wandering I, mucking I, obscene obscenity forever and always and milking and transmissing and mucking wandering amongst the forever and the always I; obscenity obscene, mucking milking milk ancestral forever and ever to have and to hold and to be and now and always and forever; this now, wandering now, transmissing now, mucking now, milking now, obscene obscenity now, ancestral now, forever to be and to hold and to have always.

Adrianne Mathiowetz

Rating: really liked it
At some point in high school, I decided that I hated Ernest Hemingway. Was it the short story we read in English class? Was it the furniture collection named after him at Gabbert's? Something made me decide that Hemingway was a prick, and after that I dismissed him entirely.

This book was beautiful.

I don't even like books about war. (Case in point: I scanned half of War and Peace. I think which half is obvious.) But this book took five hundred pages to blow up a single bridge. There were tanks to count, grenades to gather, diagrams to be drawn and generals to contact. Somehow all of this managed to be completely enthralling to a reader whose eyes would otherwise glaze over at the mere mention of battalions.

I have to admit, a big part of my interest in it was likely due to the whole "American escapes America to live in caves and drink absinthe with the gypsies" thing. Who doesn't want to fantasize about that? And sleeping on pine needles, and falling in love with the gypsy girl! YES.

But mostly: I love how Hemingway writes his dialogue as though it were being directly translated. I love the slow sense of living, the feeling of being in the open air, the way you enter his main character's head through his stream of conscious ramblings. And I love that Robert Jordan is referred to as Robert Jordan throughout the entire book -- the way you refer to famous people, historical figures, the names you must commit to memory.

Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it

Acclaimed as one of Hemingway’s greatest novels, and indeed worthy of this distinction, For Whom the Bell Tolls is the story of an idealist during the Spanish Civil War - which was a bloody and treacherous prelude to WWII. Hemmingway was one of many artists that opposed Franco's repression of the Catalan Republic which was founded on Anarchist principles and crushed mercilessly by the right-wing Falangists with the full support of Hitler (while promised support for the Catalonians from Britain and France never materialized due to their failed strategy of Appeasement). This is the subject of Picasso's Guernica in Madrid's Reina Sophia museum - one of the most powerful pieces of art on the planet. In any case, it is against this fatalistic background (it was written in 1940, a few years after the annihilation of the movement), Hemmingway places an idealist American fighting for Catalonia and, well, things do not end well as one might surmise. It is a typically understated masterpiece of Hemmingway prose that can be read as a historical document about the failed revolution, a swan song for the pre-WWII idealism, or a precursor to the death and destruction of WWII to come, but nonetheless, it must be read as an essential anti-war text and an American masterpiece.

Robert Jordan is sent behind the fascist lines in the mountains near Segovia and there he joins forces with a band of guerrilla fighters and falls in love with Maria, a young girl who barely survived captivity by the fascists and was rescued by the band. There is Pablo and his wife Pilar, the de facto leaders, a gypsy Rafael, an older man Anselmo and a few other revolutionaries. Robert’s mission to blow up a bridge over a deep gorge while the Republican army opens a new front in the war, hoping to conquer Segovia, is an ill-thought-out move and some disagreement in the group nearly leads to a split.

The book is Hemingway’s longest and his protagonist Robert Jordan may be the closest to an autobiographical portrait as he also lost his father to a suicide and seems addicted to action and violence.

Don't miss my review of the Meyer biography of Hemingway: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Mutasim Billah

Rating: really liked it
“If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

Set in the middle of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the tale of one Robert Jordan, an American who is given an assignment to work with a republican guerrilla unit to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.

The story explores various wartime sentiments such as thoughts of mortality, the possibility of suicide to escape torture and execution at the hands of enemy, camaraderie, betrayal, different political ideologies and bigotry.



Ernest Hemingway (center) in 1937 with Ilya Ehrenburg (Russian author, left) and Gustav Regler (German writer, right) during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)


The book garnered much attention for Hemingway's incorporation of a strange semi-archaic form of English to represent text translated from Spanish. Several real-life figures of Marxist background who played a part in the war are mentioned in the text as well. The book was unanimously recommended for the Pulitzer back in 1941 but the decision was controversially reversed by the board and no award was given that year.

Side-notes:

Hemingway himself was involved in the Spanish Civil War as a journalist. In 1937, Hemingway agreed to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), arriving in Spain in March with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Ivens was filming The Spanish Earth, a propaganda film in support of the Republican side. He wanted Hemingway to replace John Dos Passos as screenwriter, since Dos Passos had left the project when his friend José Robles was arrested and later executed.



Hemingway (center) with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and German writer Ludwig Renn (serving as an International Brigades officer) in Spain during Spanish Civil War, 1937

Lisa

Rating: really liked it
Not my favourite Hemingway, a little bit too slow.

But the topic of the Spanish Civil War makes it a good read, and the John Donne poem that gave the novel its title should be yelled, shouted, sung, recited, hummed and whispered by heart over and over again, especially in these times of outlandishly islandish people destroying the world again:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know FOR WHOM
THE BELL TOLLS; it tolls for thee.

Thank you Hemingway for being involved in mankind!

Kenny

Rating: really liked it
How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
For Whom The Bell Tolls ~~ Ernest Hemingway


Selected by Alan for April 2022 Big Book Read

Sadly, it's en vogue to hate Ernest Hemingway these days. Hemingway was selfish and egomaniacal, a faithless husband and a treacherous friend. He drank too much, he brawled and bragged too much, he was a thankless son and a negligent father. Hemingway was a terrible person, and he was brilliant writer ~~ a very brilliant writer.

I've noticed that most of those who hate on Hemingway have never read Hemingway ~~ or they've only read The Old Man and the Sea in a high school English class. The brilliant The Old Man and the Sea is over the head of most 15-year-olds.

I wish people could get past this hatred of Hemingway. I will continue to shout it from the rooftops ~~ Hemingway is a brilliant writer!



There is a tremendous amount of sadness in Hemingway’s best novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. How could there not be? It’s about the Spanish Civil War; that most terrible of events pitting the bad against the equally bad. The story is simple, the tale of an American who ends up fighting on the side of the republicans against the fascist government. His task? Blow up a bridge. His conflict? A sudden and growing romance with Maria; some existential conflicts about the meaning of the war; the desire to die a purposeful death that is also painless.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a brilliant story inspired from true events during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s ~~ the guerrilla warfare between the fascist leader Franco and the Republican resistance. A story that bluntly accepts the horrors of life and one that sheds light on the sheer obstacles that people can overcome with purpose.



For Whom the Bell Tolls is told in the wonderfully smooth prose that employs both a refreshing truth in dialogue and also a realistic depiction of the human mind. For Whom the Bell Tolls projects the actual human beings caught in conflict. The characters face significant challenges and are faced with tribulations we can hardly imagine, yet the daily struggles and moments of joy and laughter are shown as well. It was this integration of even the most trivial of things that brings this story to life, and somehow made the story even more tragic, depicting the continuity and normalization of living always with the possibility of death lurking beyond.

The range of characters that Hemingway creates is incredible. Robert Jordan is the typical driven military man who won't allow himself to feel emotion, then encounters love. But the exploration of his mental tenacity takes this common character, and makes him a brilliant protagonist. His willingness to sacrifice anything for what he believes to be a great cause is presented in such a humble manner that is just incredible. Alongside him, we have Pilar, the aging woman, wise and fiery, brutal and loving. Her motivations and limitations were written so realistically, and that is what sets these characters apart from most other fictional characters. I could go through a long list of the unique characters here, but my point is that if you read this, you will come away feeling an intense connection with each and every person. That is one of Hemingway's greatest qualities as a writer.



Alongside the wonderful prose and characterization, the plot is also brilliant. A series of twists and turns, of big and small events that expertly drove the pace forward at what I felt to be near perfection. There were scenes that slow the pace down and really make you think as a reader, and then there are those heart pounding moments that drew me into the chaos taking place, from the skirmishes to moments of clarity and the times when all seems to have descended into failure.

I think you know by now; I loved this book. Hemingway presents ideas of love, anger, hatred, discrimination and determination in such nuanced ways that are genuinely moving.



For Whom the Bell Tolls is an amazing book that not only delivers a thrilling read, but also has an intense moral code that one can aspire to follow.

Madeline

Rating: really liked it
Just when I'd decided that Hemingway only ever wrote books about people getting drunk in cafes and thinking about how miserable they are, he surprises me and comes out with something like this. Naturally, the characters still get drunk and think about how miserable they are, but they do it while being guerrilla fighters in the Spanish Civil War, which makes it awesome.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien writes that, "If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." I kept coming back to that quote as I read this book, because it proves that Robbins was absolutely right. For Whom the Bell Tolls is not an uplifting story, and it's not moral. And when you're writing about a ragtag bunch of rebels fighting a fascist army, that's not easy to do. There are no good guys in this story, and no bad guys - not even the fascists.

"Good" and "Bad" in this story isn't divided by such clear lines. Instead, the biggest enemy that the protagonist (I won't use the word "hero") Robert Jordan faces is within the rebel group itself - a lot of strong personalities are drawn together by this war, and throwing them all together and making them live in a cave maybe wasn't the best way to go about things. The result is a fascinating portrait of a small group of people under enormous pressure, all trying to do the right thing even as they question what the right thing really is. Even when you're fighting fascists, nothing is black and white.

Another observation: having previously believed that Hemingway was incapable of writing compelling female characters, I am now forced to revise that opinion. There are only two women in this book, but they are both fully realized and compelling. Other reviewers found Maria one-dimensional, but I thought she was fascinating because of what was hinted at, but not revealed, about her. Her staggering understatement to describe her time as a prisoner of war - "Things were done to me" - is wonderful. She was tragic and sweet, and on a related note, Hemingway writes some surprisingly good sex scenes, so there's that.

And Pilar. Holy crap. Probably one of the most well-done characters I've ever read, she's alternately the mother figure, the best friend, the confidante, and the villain. Pilar is my new spirit animal.

A war story without heroes or villains, full of hollow victories and rage against the bureaucracy of war and what people under pressure can be forced to do, filled with some very good meditations on killing and war and love, and the importance of acting beyond personal gain. Well done, Mr. Hemingway.

(I should also add that Campbell Scott, who read the audiobook, does a fantastic job - he makes the characters' voices different enough for you to tell them apart without difficulty, and his Robert Jordan voice is exactly how I imagine Hemingway sounded in real life. If you're considering reading this, I'd recommend tracking down the audio version)

Luís

Rating: really liked it
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" is the story of a mission carried out over three days in the middle of the war in Spain by a team of Spanish partisans to blow up a bridge under the command of an American volunteer.
Three days from which an increasing dramatic power emerges, which keeps the reader in maximum tension until the inevitable end. There are three days of rare density with men and women who are brave, disillusioned, broken, determined, bound by hatred of the enemy, prisoners of their collective history and accounts, discovering the power of their courage simultaneously of love.
An immense novel, through the little story within the big one, sweeps away the entire human condition, in all littleness, its ability to overcome its situation and the inevitable fatality of its mortal destiny, the values' height ​​and the baseness of its instincts, the elegance of its solidarity and the mediocrity of its power games.
Size, immense, height: my apologies for this somewhat weak lexical field. That's what it is!

Loretta

Rating: really liked it
Suffice it to say, I am not a Hemingway fan.