For Whom the Bell Tolls

What struck me most in this novel was the language. Hemingway of course is known for his journalistic style, but there it was his willingness to mirror the Spanish language, making the distinction between the thou and the you to demonstrate familiarity and ultimately emotion.
The politics were well explained without being burdening; the cultural aspects and the horrors of the war are very moving and bring the readers into the story, especially at the end, where we are left alone with Jordan. Finally, I liked the flashback to the American Civil War - it made me better understand why Jordan was there in the first place, so all ties in well from a historical and psychological perspective. Definitely a tour de force.

Oh boy. The printer almost did me in with this one. I got to page 442 and the next page was 412. Only the fact that Jim had the text on Kindle saved me from self-explosion. And it's a library book! Didn't anyone tell the librarian about the defect?!?!

ok. got that said. Now, about the book.

I was somewhat surprised by how many people in my f2f reading group actively disliked this book. They objected to Hemingway's portrayal of women (gee, the younger one is pretty naive, and the older one isn't. right). They objected to his attempt to represent the difference between 'usted' and 'tu' in Spanish by using 'you' and 'thou', etc. in English. And I admit that some of the attempts to make the text sound like a translation from the Spanish were show more worse than awkward,and the editor did the story no favor in insisting that the naturally obscene language be masked so clumsily.

But what about the story? What about the naive volunteer trying his best to be a good soldier for a cause he thinks he believes in, in spite of what we know about the errors and excesses of that cause? The partisan band in the hills, trying to say alive so that they can go back to being farmers and vintners, each one delineated as a distinct person with frailties and honor in unique proportion? And the honesty of the brutality on both sides of this gruesome war, the ineptitude and cynicism of the commanders, the pain of both dying and killing, and the fatalism war can engender.

The intense writing made me see everything as if through a close-up lens. Although the language can seem moderately straightforward (and no, it's not all simple declarative sentences by any means), I had to slow down to capture the vivid detail, even when I wanted to story to move faster because the tension mounts even though the inevitability of the outcome seems clearer every step of the way.

Bad grammar, bad usage can pull me right out of a mediocre story, but nothing could pull me out of this one. show less

"Are there no pleasant things to speak of?...Do we have to talk always of horrors?" asks Maria at one point in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Good question.

To be fair, For Whom the Bell Tolls isn't ALL about horrors. It even has some pleasant moments. But ultimately, it's about the selfless nature of war---which, though Hemingway clearly intends us to admire the acts of sacrifice to which the war incites his characters, I think is the greatest condemnation of war.

But Hemingway's portrayal of this theme is quite powerful. He isn't always consistent, but he is about as consistent as it is possible to be about such a theme and much more so than most, which is of great artistic value.

It's also generally very well written, much more so than (and show more something of a relief after reading) a lot of faux-Hemingway like John Steinbeck or Cormac McCarthy. And I thought this was much better than the only other Hemingway I've read, A Farewell to Arms. But there are a few passages that miss the mark, such as this almost comically bad sex scene: "...They were having now and before and always and now and now and now. Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now. Come now, now, for there is no now but now. Yes, now. Now, please now, only now, not anything else only this now, and where are you and where am I and where is the other one, and not why, not ever why, only this now; and on and always please then always now, always now, for now always one now; one only one, there is no other one but one now, one, going now, rising now, sailing now, leaving now, wheeling now, soaring now, away now, all the way now, all of all the way now; one and one is one, is one, is one, is one, is still one, is still one, is one descendingly, is one softly, is one longingly, is one kindly, is one happily, is one in goodness, is one to cherish, is one now..." blah blah blah.

The mind-numbing repetitiousness of this "description" (if one can call it that) is especially unfortunate as it echoes another passage just a few pages earlier which is intended to have quite a different feel: "...muck this whole treacherous muckfaced mucking country and every mucking Spaniard in it on either side and to hell forever. Muck them to hell together, Largo, Prieto, Asensio, Miaja, Rojo, all of them. Muck every one of them to death to hell. Muck the whole treachery-ridden country. Muck their egotism and their selfishness and their selfishness and their egotism and their conceit and their treachery. Muck them to hell and always. Muck them before we die for them. Muck them after we die for them. Muck them to death and hell..." It goes on like this at some length.

But in the end, Hemingway affirms that there are "pleasant things to speak of": "That is in Madrid. Just over the hills there, and down across the plain. Down out of the gray rocks and the pines, the heather and the gorse, across the yellow high plateau you see it rising white and beautiful. That part is just as true as Pilar's old women drinking the blood down at the slaughterhouse. There's no one thing that's true. It's all true. The way the planes are beautiful whether they are ours or theirs." But the horrors win out in the end: "The hell they are, he thought." show less

Supposedly uncensored Estonian edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", but...

You'll probably wonder why an English speaker would read Ernest Hemingway in an Estonian translation. Aside from the simple answer of "because I can", the main answer is that "For Whom the Bell Tolls” has always been a problematic and awkward read in the original for me.

The reason for that is because Hemingway takes an affected stance as if he was writing in Spanish and the text was being simultaneously translated into English, which results in:

a. Awkward passages of broken English e.g.
"Do you come for us to do another train?" - Chapter 2
"Is the same to me. Better four good than much bad." - Chapter 11
b. Seemingly anachronistic Elizabethan English full of show more thous, thees and thys in an attempt to approximate the familiar form of address in Spanish e.g.
“... when thou wert wiping thy mother’s milk off thy chin.” - Chapter 11
“But did thee feel the earth move?” - Chapter 13
c. Hemingway’s self censorship with the use of the words “obscenity” & “unprintable” in place of rough language, resulting in passages such as
“Care well for thy unprintable explosive.” - Chapter 3
“I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness.” - Chapter 9
d. The paradoxical use of those same curse words in the original Spanish, but left untranslated.
“But me cago en la leche, but I will be content when it starts.” - Chapter 39

All of those problems disappear in this supposedly uncensored 2014 edition of Enn Soosaar’s Estonian translation which was first published in 1970. (Unfortunately, I don’t own a copy of that original so I have to guess that the censorship was in the areas of both curse words and politics.) The speaking is translated normally, the Estonian familiar form is not anachronistic, logical choices of relatively minor curse words are used instead of “rõvedus” (obscenity) and the Spanish is translated in footnotes (with one exception that I noticed).

So the only catch is that they may have now printed all of Soosaar’s translation, but they don’t seem to have gone back to check whether he actually translated the entire thing in the first place. i.e. based on at least one example, I suspect Soosaar left untranslated some passages that he felt wouldn’t make it past the then Soviet censor in any case.
In chapter 27 aka "Sordo’s Last Stand" there is a paragraph:
"That they should aid us now," another man said. "That all the cruts* of Russian sucking swindlers should aid us now." He fired and said, “Me cago en tal, I missed.”
In the Estonian translation this reads as:
“Et nad aitaksid meid praegu,” ütles üks meestest. Ta tulistas ja ütles “Me cago en tal. Jälle lasksin mööda.”
You can probably tell that the middle sentence which curses the Russians has been left out in the Estonian. It would have read something like "Et kõik need sittad Vene imejad petturid peaksid aitama meid nüüd.”

Otherwise, this is a terrific translation which now made this work completely readable for me. It would be interesting to know how other international translators solve these sorts of issues.

*Hemingwayspeak for “shits” show less

Maria was very hard on his bigotry. So far she had not affected his resolution but he would much prefer not to die. He would abandon a hero's or a martyr's end gladly. He did not want to make a Thermopylae, nor be Horatius at any bridge, nor be the Dutch boy with his finger in that dyke. No. He would like to spend some time with Maria. That was the simplest expression of it. He would like to spend a long, long time with her." (pp171-2).

There are a great many books that have a great reputation but fail to live up to them. Classic literature in particular can often have a reputation that those who slug through their weighty prose and dull characters find hard to fathom. In what must seem like heresy to many book lovers, I often personally show more prefer the notion of having read a book, rather than enjoying the act of reading it and immersing oneself in it. I anticipated a similar response from myself when I sat down to read my first Hemingway novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Thankfully, and somewhat to my surprise, it did not elicit such a response and touched something deeper and more joyful.

Set over three days, this nearly-500-page novel (in my paperback Arrow edition) is set in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, with Robert Jordan, an American volunteer for the Republican side, being ordered to meet up with a band of guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines and blow up a bridge for military reasons that one does not need to go into here (nor does one need to have a particular interest in history to enjoy the story). But it is more than just a war novel, as it is upon linking up with the guerrilla band that he meets Maria, and the story begins a romantic arc. Both the war and romance angles are well-developed and executed; indeed, so perfect is the balance between the two that, if pushed, one could not firmly place Hemingway's novel in either the war or the romance genre if it meant its unjust exclusion from the other.

It is a beautiful story expertly told; this is often called Hemingway's masterpiece and though, as I mentioned earlier, I have not (yet) read any of his other work, For Whom the Bell Tolls seems to show an author at the peak of his craft. The pacing is superb; one might reasonably assume that, given it stretches a three-day period over nearly 500 pages, it might stumble or digress or indulge on occasion - but it does not. Though it may seem strange to label it so for a book of this type, it is something of a page-turner from page one right through to its powerful ending. The strength of that ending is largely due to the impressive characterisation. With 500 pages to work with, Hemingway adds a depth and camaraderie to all the members of Jordan's diverse guerrilla band so that when the attack on the bridge does come, one is invested in each and every one of them.

True to its title, Hemingway lends a sense of inevitable doom to the novel. The spectre of the bridge looms large throughout the guerrilla camp for the three days that precede the battle, but it is not the only episode of tension. The story of the start of the 'movement' - the civil war - as told by Pilar to Robert Jordan and Maria in Chapter 10 is of a brooding, operatic brutality that, to my mind, would not be out of place as the opening set-piece of a Sergio Leone western. And the echoes of battle which torture Primitivo's ears in Chapter 25 also wear heavily on the reader as we share his anguish. As a journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway is also able to provide perceptive and wry commentary on the contemptuous nature of war, mostly from Robert Jordan's inner monologue but also from others. ('I hate these pistol brandishers,' one minor character states of his superior officer. 'They cannot give an order without jerking a gun out. They probably pull out their pistols when they go to the toilet and order the move they will make.' (pg. 329)).

It may seem churlish to propose any criticisms of the novel given my admiration for it, but some of the language of the novel seemed bizarre, to say the least, and these irregularities I found somewhat difficult to shake. All the characters speak with 'thou' and 'thee' (Understandest thou?' one character asks), which seems far too much of a formality for a mostly-peasant band of guerrillas ('Eatest thou always onions for breakfast?' goes another casual conversation). I understand Hemingway did this as a sort of transliteration from the Spanish 'tú', and employed other archaisms to suggest to the English-speaking reader that the characters are speaking a foreign language, but it does hinder one's immersion in the dialogue. It nagged at me persistently throughout the novel, and I found it hard to shake that I was not reading the Gospel According to Ernest ('guard well thy explosive' must be one of the lost commandments!). Furthermore, there is a lot of censoring of obscenities which borders on the absurd at times. Hemingway has a bit of fun with it ('go muck yourself' and 'we are mucked', for example) but it reaches such levels of unwieldy absurdity that at one point a character is asked, 'What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable unmarried gypsy obscenity?' (pg. 32). Another guerrilla bemoans how they must 'blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves off out of these mountains', before instructing Jordan to 'go to the unprintable... and unprint thyself' (pg. 48). However, one does begin to become accustomed to these and some of the peculiar phrases I found rather enjoyable ('thou art rare' for when someone is acting strangely, or 'how art thou called?' instead of 'what is your name?', as two examples). Indeed, one might even have a bit of fun by replacing their own choice obscenities in place of the 'unspeakables' and 'unnameables'. But I still wouldn't drink the milk...

Overall, For Whom the Bell Tolls is a fantastic novel executed perfectly by a writer at his peak. Both the war and romance arcs of the story coalesce into a single ending that satisfies both arcs. Hemingway convincingly shows how a man and woman can meet and fall in love in just a few days ('What we do not have is time. Tomorrow we must fight. To me that is nothing. But for the Maria and me it means that we must live all of our life in this time.' (pg. 302)). Maria may seem rather timid and perhaps a bit of a doormat to modern readers (though she has suffered much from the war and can be excused her timidity and dutiful deference), but she is a nice tender foil for Robert Jordan's resoluteness. Similarly, the reader is never beaten over the head with an anti-war message; there are no glaringly obvious monologues about man's inhumanity to man, or clichéd political messages like 'why are we here?' shoehorned into the dialogue. Rather, Hemingway's impressive characterisation compels us to invest in the men and women of Jordan's guerrilla band as human beings, so that their loss is felt keenly, and the reader angrily condemns the war and violence that caused such losses. By painting such a rich tapestry of a civil war and allowing us to experience the loss it engenders ourselves, Hemingway creates a more powerful anti-war message than any novel that beats the reader over the head with a crude 'war is bad' cudgel ever could. When Hemingway does finally raise said cudgel ('War is a bitchery,' one character cries on pg. 484) it is brought down with grace and is well-placed in the context of an emotionally powerful ending. The ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls is perfect, satisfying both the war and romance arcs told within the novel. As Jordan says in something of an epiphany, '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.' (pg. 485). This revelation captures the three main aspects of the story; in essence, it summarises the theme of the novel in two succinct sentences. In Maria, Robert Jordan found the perfect expression of all the finery and beauty the world had to offer. He believed this world, with all its finery, was why he was fighting the civil war there on that damnable bridge. And finally, as he is leaving it, when the bell tolls, he hates that he could not experience more of it with her. But he won anyway because he experienced the fullness of life in those three days. It is a truly breathtaking message well-articulated and a perfect end to a perfect novel." show less

A really good book - if you read it appropriately. I liked it, despite two very negative opinions I got before I read it, from people I respect. You just have to ignore the melodrama, even to the point of simply skipping over the multiple pages of ill-fated romance and teary-eyed drivel. And never, ever, go to see the film. So what's so good about it? Well, for one thing it's very evocative; even for someone with no experience of Spain or Latin culture, I found myself immersed in the peasant Spanish lifestyle, the diverse set of characters, each with their own coarse and earthy appeal. Secondly, it is a gripping plot. Although the protagonist says right at the beginning that it will all end badly, there's real tension in how events show more unfold and, even knowing the tragic outcome of the civil war as a whole, the reader is somewhat drawn into believing that everything might be OK. There are also a couple of lengthy excursions into flashbacks, detailing some of the atrocities committed by both sides, and, although irritating at points, it does round out the image of a small group of people, trying to keep their heads above water in a drowning country. Finally, it's a fairly bleak portrayal of war, as it was fought in the 1930s. I fear that it's a little too heroic for my taste - there's a lot of talk about self sacrifice and giving your life for others - which is a theme I find distasteful. But in the context of the brutal, callous, and ultimately futile war, I think this is a wrenching counterpoint. "Blowing up a bridge" has almost become a iconic symbol of military futility and wasted lives. show less

I continue to be amazed at the way with which Ernest Hemingway can paint such a powerful, profound work of art with so few words. I suspect that even when I have finished all of his novels, I still will not understand this. It isn't something that I would wish to copy--it is his own writing style, not mine, and besides, I could never pull it off as elegantly. But the fact that he has created for himself such a unique style is something that I wish to emulate in my own writing. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel of war without flowery language or sugarcoating. It does not glorify battle, not even in the case of success. Hemingway has laid out for his readers a strikingly blunt portrayal of the blurred line between duty and apathy, and show more the immoral strategies employed by both sides of a conflict. But in its own way, it arrives at the conclusion that all of humanity is connected through the inherent ability of all men to feel, and to love, and that because no side is morally superior to the other, no man is ever a real hero.
This is a difficult novel to read, and should only be attempted with significant knowledge of the Spanish-American War. But all of the research that I did alongside reading For Whom the Bell Tolls was worth it. It was much easier to understand the plot line of the book when I knew the history behind it. The story also contains the first truly strong woman that I have ever seen Hemingway write. Most of the time, his women seem to be rather two-dimensional; they seem to exist merely as symbols, simply to allow the main male character to fall in love with them and discover his emotional side. Maria was a prime example of this. However, as I read in Hemingway's autobiography A Moveable Feast this summer, his wife was a very profound influence in his life, and I have wondered since why he didn't write her more often. Pilar, the unspoken leader of the guerrilla force, has hopes, fears, strengths and weaknesses. She is well rounded, believable, and flawed. She is undoubtedly my favorite character in the story.
I would recommend this novel to anyone willing not only to do the research, but to really sit down and enjoy the novel. It really is worth the time, if you have it. show less