771 pages @350 wds/pg
First line:
He lay on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.
Great lines:
Think about Montana. I can't. Think about Madrid. I can't. Think about a cool drink of water. All right. That's what it will be like. Like a cool drink of water. You're a liar. It will just be nothing. That's all it will be. Just nothing.
Ernest Hemingway's works are seldom taught in university, one professor told me, because there is nothing to say about them. I suppose this means Hemingway's lean.... more
If you need a Hollywood-style film of a Hemingway novel, you couldn't do much better than 1943's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the novel, it's exiting, tense, cynical, romantic.... more
For me this is the big Hemingway book. His greatest work and one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. And it is a big book, his longest.
But For Whom the Bell Tolls does not read as long. Partly because the majority of it is dialogue and much of the rest of it is interior dialogue within the protagonist.
But mainly because it contains the most vivid scenes, the strongest characters and most intense action you are likely to find in a serious novel. All written in Hemingway's leanest prose, without an unnecessary frill. And written, for the first time in a major Hemingway novel, in the third person, albeit strictly from the protagonist's point of view.
Robert Jordan is a demolitions expert assigned during the Spanish Civil War to work with a Republican unit in the mountains. The Spaniards, living in caves and fighting as what we would call guerillas today, are ostensibly led by Pablo, a once noble fighter for democracy who has degenerated into little more than a bandit. The real rebel power rests with Pilar, a strong old Spanish woman, one of the most memorable fictional creations in modern times. The other members of the group also become well known to us as they fight the enemy and interact among themselves. Jordan falls in love with Maria, a traumatized young victim of Franco's Falangist forces. But in the end Jordan must serve a higher end than sexual love.
Long after the dramatic ending of the novel, what may stay with you, apart from two or three indelible characters, are the gripping and chilling stories told by those characters about events from the class war taking place in Spain in the mid-1930s.
Especially and rightfully famous are the parallel stories of the fascists arriving in Maria's village and executing her parents against a slaughterhouse wall and the uprising in Pilar's village in which the fascists were executed by running them through a gauntlet and over a cliff.
Hemingway's usual cynical attitude toward puffed-up principles and toward war in particular is still evident in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Jordan goes out of his way to eschew strong political commitments, pointing out that he aligns himself with the communist factions of the Republican forces because they are the best organized and most disciplined.
But in this novel Hemingway's cynicism is modified by his acceptance that the Spanish Civil War is unlike previous wars and that some causes—such as that of the people—are worth fighting and dying for. This gives the novel a drive not found in his more detached previous works.
— Eric
