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For Whom the Bell Tolls
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Rating: 4.3/5 from 185 reviews A True ClassicGood Good book"For Whom the Bell Tolls" was the first Hemingway I ever read. I was a high school kid in the early 2000's, working on my campus newspaper, newly graduated from Jack London but not yet ready for Jack Kerouac. To my young eyes, it was a good action story: Robert Jordan, the passionate American teacher joins a band of armed gypsies in the Spanish Civil War. He believes one man can make a difference. The whole novel covers just 68 hours, during which Jordan must find a way to blow up a key bridge behind enemy lines. In that short time, Jordan also falls in love with Maria, a beautiful Spanish woman who has been raped by enemy soldiers. The whole spectrum of literature was refracted through the prism of my youth: Good guys and bad guys, sex and blood, life and death. For me, just a boy, the journey from abstraction to clarity was only just beginning. Re-reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at 18 (roughly the age Hemingway was when he published it), I have lost my ability to see things clearly in black and white. My vision is blurred by irony, as I note that two enemies, the moral killer Anselmo and the sympathetic fascist Lieutenant Berrendo, utter the very same prayer. For the first time, I see that the book opens with Robert Jordan lying on the "pine-needled floor of the forest" and closes as he feels his heart pounding against the "pine needle floor of the forest"; Jordan ends as he begins, perhaps having never really moved. I certainly could never have seen at 16 how dying well might be more consequential than living well. And somehow the light has changed in the past 1 years, so that I now truly understand how the earth can move. DRESS REHEARSHAL FOR WWIIEXCERPTED FROM "GOD'S COUNTRY" BY STEVEN TRAVERS "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is based upon Hemingway's support for the anti-Communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. He and many other Americans went over to fight in the war, which some say was a "dress rehearsal" for World War II. It did not materialize into the kind of idealized Spanish government that many had sacrificed for. The fascistic Francisco Franco ended up ruling an isolationist Spain until the 1970s. While the nation is now Democratic, the Franco regime was the final event that took Spain from greatness to mediocrity. Hemingway also wrote a stageplay about the Spanish Civil War called "The Fifth Column". STEVEN TRAVERS | ||||||||||||||||||||
The plot of this novel is relatively straightforward. American Robert Jordan, a member of the International Brigades fighting with the Republicans against the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, is given the task of blowing up a bridge to prevent the Fascists from bringing up reinforcements to repel a Republican offensive. But while the plot is uncomplicated, the depth and breadth of Hemmingway's story telling are not. There are layers and layers of emotion, passion, and personal pain. You are transported to the mountains of Spain with Jordan and a band of Spanish guerilla fighters. The characters are so incredibly real, that you feel as though you could find their names in a history book. For those who have never read Hemmingway, I'd say give it a try.