For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Hemingway uses special "literary techniques" in "For whom the Bell Tolls" that rather than enhancing the reading experience detract from it. Please see the list below. The ending is totally soppy. You learn nothing about the Spanish Civil War, and a better explanation for why Robert Jordan decided to fight with the Republicans should have been given. The scenes depicting physical attraction were bland and insipid. Some dislike the macho behavior of Hemingway's characters, but this doesn't bother me. I see it as typical of the times, and Pilar is the best character of this novel. She is a strong, intelligent, no-nonsense woman! What remains undeniably true though is that Hemingway can draw a scene so you see, hear, smell and feel it in your pores. It is interesting to see what goes through a soldier's mind, but there is so much wrong with this book I cannot justify a better rating.

I listened to the audiobook. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Scott Campbell's narration, except that a few bomb blasts fell flat. Even a good narrator cannot save a bad book.

May I suggest A Farewell to Arms instead?!

************************

Through 1/2 of chapter 10:
I very much enjoy the description of the landscapes and events. I like the strength and clarity of the prose. The dialogs have stopped bothering me. I am in chapter 10 and what happens is truly moving. You feel as the villagers' mood changes from controlled hostility to frenzied anger to drunken brutality. There is a massacre in the town.

Through Hemingway's usage of the words thee and thou, I understand now that he is simply giving the reader more information about the relationship between the individuals speaking. It doesn't disturb me in the slightest any more. In fact I like it! It serves a purpose.
(Please note that by the end of the book I was totally fed up with this.)

I am in fact totally enjoying the book now. I have come to care for some of the characters, Pilar in particular. There is emotion in the book. There is the theme of what makes a person fight in a war. Motivation is not the same for all, and thus one person's behavior will be very different from another's.

*************************

Through chapter 7:
This is what is bugging me:
1. The dialogs are NOT in the least believable. None of them.
2. Swear words are replaced with "unprintable word" or "obscenity". This is ridiculous and disrupts the prose! "F*/k you" will be written, "obscenity you", for example. Crazy!
3. In the 30s people did not speak with the terms "thy", "thee", "thou art". This is driving me nuts. WHY has Hemingway done this?
(Answer: Kim explained this to me. It is to show the relationship between the people speaking. Please see comments 21-22 below!)
4. Robert Jordan is holier than "thou" (:0)), and it drives me crazy. SUCH a perfect soldier with SUCH motivation, and he is SO devoted to his job.
5. To top it all off the love between Maria and Robert Jordan jumps out of nowhere. The same day they meet they are in bed, no, actually a sleeping bag, and then she says in one of those above mentioned dialogs that she doesn't know how to kiss. Jeez! (OK, if one is a little patient an explanation is given.)
6. And what is this with calling Robert Jordan Robert Jordan?. Everyone else goes by one name, usually a nickname!

I will persevere. Why? Well because I DO enjoy Hemingway's depictions of places and events. They become moving and laden with feeling. You feel the immensity of those airplanes lined up in rows. You hear the gurgling stream. There is something that draws me to Hemingway's writing; it is just the dialogs that irritate me.

I LIKED [b:A Farewell to Arms|10799|A Farewell to Arms|Ernest Hemingway|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1313714836s/10799.jpg|4652599]. I hope this turns around for me.

Completed Feb 28, 2013 ( )

re-read ( )

I spent tonight complaining to my RL book club buddies (what up Gray!) about how this feels kinda the same as [b:A Farewell to Arms.|10799|A Farewell to Arms|Ernest Hemingway|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1313714836s/10799.jpg|4652599] Same stolid lead, same gushy love story, same (I suspect) dire ending. (Come on, we all read the title.)

[Later on...] Having finished it, though, I'm not so sure. I think he's about something different here. Sure, his style is unmistakeable. Since we were talking about movies tonight, I'll compare him to Tarantino: you'll always recognize a Tarantino movie, because his characters talk in a way that no one talks outside of a Tarantino movie. Same with Hemingway. And sure, he does have themes he's obsessed with. But with Bell, ten years after Farewell to Arms, he's writing a different plot. Farewell was just about the tawdry chaos of war; Bell Tolls is about purpose, and what that means and where it can go wrong. Henry had no goals, or at least not until it was too late; Jordan, by contrast, has a very specific goal, which may not be the right one.

Yes, these are worthily different plots. Hemingway's style is still so distinctive, so tic-laden, that it's distracting - and some of the prose here is pretty fucking purple, by the way. But I was wrong to suspect that he wrote the same book every time. This is a different book. That's a compliment.

This is his best book, too. His most focused and his most exciting. It covers maybe four days in intense detail, explains its top six or eight characters with terrific truth, and it drives with tremendous force.

He pulls a nice trick: above I mentioned that someone's gonna die, because of the name of the book. But Jordan survives the blowing of the bridge so Hemingway gives us this wonderful catharsis, after all the dread of the previous 450 pages...and then kills him anyway. It's manipulative, but it's a good trick and it's pulled off really well. We get the relief, and then the final blow, coupled with the supremely shmaltzy "I am part of you now" speech to Maria. Hemingway is a blunt instrument, but he's effective.

Hemingway is, barely, the most accessible and least complicated of the trio I associate him with - Faulkner, Steinbeck, him. His scope is the least epic. And he is badly sentimental. There's always a love interest and there is never any doubt about it. He falls in love like a ninth-grader does. The difference is that the ninth-grader is on to something else two weeks later, whereas with Hemingway someone dies.

It's a flaw, but I find Hemingway tremendously likable. His plots are tight and clear, his philosophy stops where it ought to, and his stories wrap themselves up perfectly. He's an excellent novelist. No, I don't think he's as complicated as Steinbeck or Faulkner. Steinbeck is, at his best, epic and grand and just as intensely readable; Faulkner is trying things that neither of the others had the balls to. Faulkner is also a pain in the ass; Steinbeck is the best of them. Hemingway is right in the middle.

And as a guy who is in love, Hemingway's grandiose descriptions of it work for me. Okay, rabbit.
( )

Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is not a reliable view of the Spaniards during the decade of the 1930s or of their 1936-39 Civil War. From both of those perspectives, the novel has its difficulties.

In Spain of the post-Franco years, and especially since the opening of the archives of the old Soviet Union, the debate about the role of the Communist in the Republic both before and after Franco’s rebellion has increased with renewed intensity. It has long been clear that the war was not a simple black-and-white conflict between a freely elected democratic State (the Republic), on one side, and an insurgent Fascism, on the other. What is emerging in greater clarity, however, is the role of the Communists.

The historian Stanley Payne—one of my professors at the University of Wisconsin—has argued that Russia’s subvention of the Republic both before and after 1936 was far more extensive than many once thought. Even if his conclusion that the Republic was moving toward a Communist totalitarianism well before the military’s 1936 intervention is not universally accepted, it is certain that the Republic (a coalition of Anarchists, Socialists, Communists and Republicans) was ill disposed to grant the right wing (a grouping of Church, Military and Fascists) any position in the political arena. It also seems clear that the West’s economic embargo did not drive the Republic into Russia’s hands. The Republican government’s links to Moscow, which supplied that government with armaments and strategy, were cemented well before that embargo.

Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (published in 1940) emerged out of a simpler, less Machiavellian view of the conflict that circulated outside of Spain and that romanticized the Republican cause and minimized Russia’s pernicious involvement. Hemingway’s novel—its plot and characters-- is certainly compelling and continues to rank among his best writing even given some of the negative criticism of the language which was intended to reflect the Spanish spoken by the characters. But, as a window on the Spanish and their war, the novel is unreliable. Although Hemingway worked as a journalist in Spain during a large part of the conflict, he was at best disengaged from the complexities of politics as they played out in Spain through 1939. His time in Madrid in the Hotel Florida, as Hemingway himself describes it, was far less political than social. He certainly never embraced the ideology of any of the Communist parties. He did, however, emerge as a spokesperson for the myths forged by the Stalinists.

When I first read For Whom the Bell Tolls as a teenager in 1956, I found both the setting and the politics of the war described by Hemingway as engaging as the novel’s more transcendental themes. I had no reason to doubt the authenticity of Hemingway’s voice in regard to Spain and its War. Robert Jordan, the young American academic fighting in Spain as part of the International Brigades on the side of the Republic, carried me into the mountains around Segovia and into a Spain of matadors, peasants and shepherds. And, although Hemingway described atrocities on both sides of the conflict [Pilar’s account of Pablo’s sacking of a small mountain town (based on actual events in the town of Ronda?) in the environs of Avila is quite chilling], the Republican guerrillas cemented my sympathies for their crusade. As Robert Jordan, I was a Republican. As Robert Jordan, I fell in love with María. And similar to Jordan, I saw the war and the inevitability of a victory of Franco’s Nationalists as the death of truth and idealism in Spain itself. Democracy defeated at the hands of Fascism. Here was the image: Robert Jordan’s commitment to blowing up a bridge was a XX Century reenactment of Don Quijote’s charge at windmills.

Having re-read For Whom the Bell Tolls in 2011, after years of studying Spanish history and culture and of living in the country itself off and on during Franco’s dictatorship, I now find it as a view of the Spaniards and of their Civil War both unreliable and deeply flawed. On the other hand, I find the work’s themes—death, honor, commitment, love—and Hemingway’s treatment of them far more meaningful for me than the novel’s physical setting and its portrayal of the Civil War. Hemingway’s treatment of those themes engaged me in 2011 as much as the novel did in 1956.
( )

Hemingway's meditation on dying well wasn't my favourite of his. I didn't like it nearly as much as A Farewell to Arms, for instance, or even A Moveable Feast. Mind you, for me Hemingway's at his best when he's writing a short story. ( )