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Loading... For Whom the Bell Tollsby Ernest Hemingway
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I LOVE HEMINGWAY. I want to resurrect him and have him give writing classes to modern novelists. I want to hang out with him and smoke cigars but I don't smoke so eat candy cigarettes and make him a pie. I hated him in high school but I can't remember why and it's obviously because I was brain damaged because this book is AWESOME. It's hopeful and hopeless, moving and unemotional, cynical and courageous all at the same time and it's just EPIC. (  ) maryjanemanolos | Nov 7, 2009 |  Hemingway's a pretty boring writer and his themes aren't complex enough to warrant such long novels. I mean, I like short and declarative sentences so it's alright but really, I don't intend to read many other novels of his, just his short stories. (  ) phette23 | Oct 19, 2009 | Those who have not seen the elephant and lack the courage to go looking for it have no right to criticize Ernest Hemingway, who set out as a young man to find the elephant and get a good long look at the Beast, and then describe it for the rest of us. As a young man he did not yet realize that few people are as brave and as honest as he. He went. He saw. He wrote. He told us all about it -- and scarcely anyone believes him. Those who don't tell the few who do that Papa was a fool and a bad man. So it is in life as it was in "The Old Man and the Sea." Now the big fish is dead, little ones come to savage the corpse. Nobody with anything to lose has a friend in this world. The person who has nothing may yet find a friend. Papa knew. Many have asked why so many literate, professional men went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The answer was simple in some cases and more complex in others. George Orwell, for his part, simply had to go to Spain. He spent his entire political life committed to the cause of democratic socialism. Hemingway's answer was a bit more complex. He borrowed part of it from the poet John Donne and used Donne's famous line as the title of his novel about the Spanish war. But Papa's commitment wasn't simply romantic: like Orwell, Hemingway believed in the Spanish cause and despised fascism utterly. Out of his experience Orwell gave us 'Homage to Catalonia' and 'Looking Back on the Spanish War,' among other great essays. He condemned with blistering irony the decision of purportedly dedicated socialists to watch from a distance while fascist boots trod the Spanish people into the ground. Papa came out of Spain and gave us one of the great romances of the 20th century. Orwell brought us tears of rage. Papa gave us tears for the human condition. You may fight from hatred. You may fight from love. Which it is doesn't matter when you're forced to fight because it's the human thing to do. George and Papa both knew. (  ) dekesolomon | Oct 9, 2009 | I'm in love with Robert Jordan. ( ) candice.fehrman | Jun 20, 2009 | 1st ed. Dw has points for 1st printing. A on TPV. ( ) kitchengardenbooks | May 9, 2009 | 
 The greatness of this book is the greatness of these people's triumph over their foreknowledge of death-to-come... For Whom the Bell Tolls, unlike other novels of the Spanish Civil War, is told not in terms of the heroics and dubious politics of the International Brigades, but as a simple human struggle of the Spanish people. The bell in this book tolls for all mankind.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0684803356, Paperback)For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing. Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades, lies "flat 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." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan is there: he has come to blow up a bridge on behalf of the antifascist guerrilla forces. He hopes he'll be able to rely on their local leader, Pablo, to help carry out the mission, but upon meeting him, Jordan has his doubts: "I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out." For Pablo, it seems, has had enough of the war. He has amassed for himself a small herd of horses and wants only to stay quietly in the hills and attract as little attention as possible. Jordan's arrival--and his mission--have seriously alarmed him."I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?"In one short chapter Hemingway lays out the blueprint for what is to come: Jordan's sense of duty versus Pablo's dangerous self-interest and weariness with the war. Complicating matters even more are two members of the guerrilla leader's small band: his "woman" Pilar, and Maria, a young woman whom Pablo rescued from a Republican prison train. Unlike her man, Pilar is still fiercely devoted to the cause and as Pablo's loyalty wanes, she becomes the moral center of the group. Soon Jordan finds himself caught between the two, even as his own resolve is tested by his growing feelings for Maria. For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix Wilber (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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