For Whom the Bell Tolls

Wow. I finished the third book I've read by Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was an incredible novel. I felt lukewarm about it early on, but it steadily grew on me. The last third of it was simply riveting.

I got my copy on eBay for next to nothing. It didn't have a dust jacket but was an attractive hard cover volume, nonetheless. I started to wonder once I was more than halfway through it if it was a censured version because it kept using the term 'obscenity' in place of actual obscenities in dialogue. I googled it, though, and learned that Hemingway had done that on this novel, in part so it would still be publishable in his time but also to preserve the color of some of the dialogue without having to be explicit about what was being specifically said. I think it works well.

Cover of Used Copy of 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'

For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the tale of Robert Jordan, an American fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He is doing so out of love for Spain even more than for his love for the cause of the Republic - at least it seems so to me. He does have a love interest that fills his heart and soul and ends up learning more about life and existence in the several days the book takes place in than he had his whole previous life. The love is so complete and so pure that it removes scales from his eyes, so to speak.

The main plot of the book revolves around his efforts and those of guerrilla fighters that are engaged to help him, to blow up a bridge during a Republic attack on Fascist positions. It's a simple plot but has its fair share of twists and turns, though, and literally surprised me more than once. This book is incredibly written. Ernest Hemingway did an outstanding job. I thought I'd share just a few quotes from it while I'm writing this:

"I would not kill even a Bishop. I would not kill a proprietor of any kind. I would make them work each day as we have worked in the fields and as we work in the mountains with the timber, all of the rest of their lives. So they would see what man is born to. That they should sleep where we sleep. That they should eat as we eat. But above all that they should work. Thus they would learn."

"And another thing. Don't ever kid yourself about loving someone. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and apart of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being."

And just one more: "My own face I could hardly recognize because my grief had changed it but I looked at it and knew that it was me. But my grief was so great that I had no fear nor any feeling but my grief."

Beautiful stuff. Another thing I loved about this book in addition to the prose was the believability of the characters. They weren't cookie-cutter versions of people but actually had some genuine depth and complexities...even those who were not main characters. It's always refreshing when an author does that well. Many of them do, but the better the execution on making the characters human goes a long way to making a story immersive.

I miss the characters already - most especially Robert and Maria but even some of the more minor characters. War is a mess and it is complicated, and even those that don't get a lot of word count can end up having a big impact on the events and on the quality of the story. I had only read The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea from Hemingway previously. This is, by far, the best of the three. I'm going to have to let this one settle for a bit in my mind but suspect I'll be thinking about it for a long while after I finished it.