Not my favourite Hemingway, a little bit too slow.

But the topic of the Spanish Civil War makes it a good read, and the John Donne poem that gave the novel its title should be yelled, shouted, sung, recited, hummed and whispered by heart over and over again, especially in these times of outlandishly islandish people destroying the world again:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know FOR WHOM
THE BELL TOLLS; it tolls for thee.

Thank you Hemingway for being involved in mankind!

This was the first full length novel by Hemingway I read and what a story it was! Romance, war scenes, behind the enemy line action. Written in Hemingway's unimitable prose I really enjoyed this story set in Spain. It's a very philosophical novel too. Absolutely recommended to every reader. It's a modern classic!

welcome to...FOR JUNE THE BELL TOLLS.

another month. another seminal work of literature added to my currently reading. another beautiful pun combining the two.

it's another PROJECT LONG CLASSIC installment.

actually kind of brave of me to have a book on my tbr for 8 years without even thinking about reading it. but the streak has to be broken eventually.

let's do this.


CHAPTER 1
i tried to start reading this with zero preparation, as i have the delusional overconfidence of a tech billionaire or a teenage boy with a tiktok account.

almost immediately i fled to wikipedia, which told me "hey this book assumes you know about the spanish civil war" and then told me what that even is.

thank you to the world's foremost intellectual property.


CHAPTER 2
aaaand we have a love interest. damn, ernest. you work fast. we haven't even seen anything get blown up yet.


CHAPTER 3
and just like that, we're four days behind. here is the entirety of my defense: it's summertime. or at least it feels like it is.


CHAPTER 4
back to back short chapters. ernest hemingway wrote this whole book for the benefit of a 25 year old a century in the future so she could keep up on homework she assigned herself.

it's an absinthe chapter!!!! we're getting hallucinatory.


CHAPTER 5
THE SHORTEST CHAPTER YET. everyone say thank you, ernest.

so far we have a lot of dialogue about people shooting people but not a lot of shooting...so either we are seriously building tension (and it's working) or this book is whatever the antonym of action-packed is. either way i'm in.


CHAPTER 6
no joke...this chapter is even shorter than the one before. heming-way to go, team.

loving how this character is only referred to as "pablo's woman" when pablo is weak and she runs everything. the fun thing about reading is that regardless of ernest's intent, i can decide he's conveying a point about misogyny and power.


CHAPTER 7
well. we have now exchanged ilys and we have gotten mr. robert jordan laid.

time is money, i guess.


CHAPTER 8
another What We Talk About When We Talk About Some Action Actually Happening chapter...but maybe the next one will be the kicker.


CHAPTER 9
now pablo's woman is referred to as THE woman...i could write essays about this transformation!!!


CHAPTER 10
what a brilliant What Humans Are Capable Of During War chapter. which is another way of saying this was impossible to read and horrible and cruel and torturous and today is a one-chapter day.


CHAPTER 11
it does seem impossible that 11 chapters in we are still talking about the same bridge. is this the climactic event? i gotta say, i thought we were building toward something bigger.


CHAPTER 12
could this be...a wee bit....a hint of...sapphic???

we have gotten roberto laid again and still not a single bridge has blown up. since i started this more bridges have collapsed in my day to day reality (1) than in this book (0). instead we have to deal with a man rationalizing himself into sleeping with a girl he knows he isn't going to marry.

100 year old situationship alert.


CHAPTER 14
at this point i have accepted that the lack of action re: the bridge is a metaphor illustrating the futility and bureaucracy of war, and by this reasoning i am back on board.


CHAPTER 15
ah, friendship.


CHAPTER 16
the bridge is nowhere in sight but we do have people hitting each other. and i've gotta say, i'm feeling like i want to hit this pablo guy in the mouth myself.


CHAPTER 17
now we're talking about plans for AFTER the bridge?! it's like i'm the only one who cares about explosions at this point.


CHAPTER 18
i have been enjoying this read since i started, but today was the first day i was like...i can't wait to pick this up. and we haven't even blown up a bridge yet!


CHAPTER 19
still no bridge, but we do have an incredible poetic description of the composite smell of death, made up of myriad images and scenes coming together into one horrible scent. so it's forgivable, still.


CHAPTER 20
classics are important because they teach you things about Eras of History. for example, now i know that people were just as horny in the 1940s as today.


CHAPTER 21
ACTION IS HAPPENING!!!

i totally and 100% understand the point that hemingway is trying to make about how war crowds out your ability to love, or to even be human, but the extracurricular "women aren't people" type unthinking misogyny really adds to the vibe.


CHAPTER 22
man oh man all of these chapters have been so delightfully short. suddenly somehow doing 43 chapters in a 30 day month seems like an effortless treat.


CHAPTER 23
took like 3.5 days off to celebrate a multiday national event known as "i saw boygenius live" and i'm still ahead of schedule. thank you, past me.


CHAPTER 24
to be honest i just watched all quiet on the western front (great movie, highly recommend, most horrifying thing i've ever seen in my life) so all war content is just going to fail in comparison to that.


CHAPTER 25
i have roughly 2 brain cells to rub together today and i am spending absolutely all of their capacity on reading my daily chapter(s) anyway.


CHAPTER 26
and hemingway heard my plea from the future and granted me a chapter that's like 3.5 paragraphs long. i can't lose.

AND it was really good. sheesh.


CHAPTER 27
back to our regularly scheduled programming. (read: a chapter you can actually measure in pages.)

i'm just going to say it. you know i'm going to say it so i might as well just get it out of the way: people are now shooting at each other and nary a bridge has seen a bomb.


CHAPTER 28
i'm sorry for all the bridge jokes. this is a compelling and real depiction of what war is like and the last chapter was jarring in its rendition of that.x

it's just...it really is a case of chekhov's unexploded infrastructure at this point.


CHAPTER 29
brain dead day.


CHAPTER 30
a chapter so somber and so exquisitely related you immediately feel bad for making a neverending series of unfunny bridge jokes.


CHAPTER 31
aaaand now we're comparing boobs to natural terrain again. phew. i almost felt something there.

oh, poor maria.


CHAPTER 32
enemy chapter. with my level of interest and ability to remember these names it functions like an intermission.


CHAPTER 33
is robert...actually...nice?

can't be, right? that'd be too easy. i can't be enjoying a classic written by some guy 100 years ago AND think the protagonist is a good dude.


CHAPTER 34
someday i hope to be as passionate about anything as hemingway is about bullfighting.


CHAPTER 35
this is a very emotional and internal chapter that brings to light the hate that has been building in our protagonist for hundreds of pages, and yet it is fully impossible to take seriously because he literally will not stop telling people to "muck" themselves.


CHAPTER 36
tensions are rising and the fate of the characters we most care about are sealed, so it is crucial that we take a quick detour to hang out with some guy on a side quest.


CHAPTER 37
for old times sake, as we reach our mortal end...let's get robert laid one last time.


CHAPTER 38
love to repeatedly say the spookiest, most superstitious and jinx-y thing i can think of and then go "nah jk jk"

aaaaand here comes the action. maybe.


CHAPTER 39
okay. so not quite yet. but i haven't heard this much talk of grenades since jersey shore was airing!

sorry about that one.


CHAPTER 40
"i obscenity you" is better than any modern-day swear, insult, expletive, or curse we could possibly come up with as a society.


CHAPTER 41
guys...i can't believe i'm saying this...but we are locked and loaded and at the bridge.


CHAPTER 42
we've checked in with the bad guys. it is time.


CHAPTER 43
the final chapter. last call to place bets on if this bridge ever goddamn explodes.

there were parts of this chapter that were the very best of the book, and there were parts that were wow, sheesh, corny. but the ending itself...so good.


OVERALL
at points, this dragged (and gave me a ton of time to make very repetitive explosion jokes, and for you to have to deal with them), and i don't think it always carried its purpose across effectively, and wowza did this sometimes feel more about premarital sex than war, but. in spite of all of it this is a good book!
rating: 3.5

American spends a great deal of time in a cave with some commies during the Spanish civil war. He then spends some more time in a cave. Then some more time in a cave. Then some more.

Hemingway writes so dryly that you'll think you've eaten three packets of Jacob's crackers.

Some chapters are brilliant, but overal this was a really long-winded read about the dehumanising and demoralising experience of modern day warfare
”War is a bitchery.”

A very male book in a sense, with a lot of dialogue and a very old fashioned way of speech (more William Shakespeare like than rural Spanish in my view). The language Ernest Hemingway uses is sparse, with weird repetitions, first of which is that the name of protagonist Robert Jordan is being mentioned every page around 3 times. Only while reading For Whom the Bell Tolls I gradually began to understand it was meant as a reflection of the translation of Spanish to English, also partly explaining the lack of variety in dialogue, nearly like how Kazuo Ishiguro wrote his Japanese character in his first two novels:
“Poor man,” she said. “He was very brave. And you do that same business?”
“Yes.”
“You have done trains, too?”
“Yes. Three trains.”
“Here?”
“In Estremadura,” he said. “I was in Estremadura before I came here. We do very much in Estremadura. There are many of us working in Estremadura.”

How Robert Jordan gets with the girl he meets at the start of the book after a few hours is James Bond like, as is how he as American outsider is able to takeover a Spanish guerrilla movement. However in for instance chapter 10 Hemingway shows his brilliance with a harrowing tale on the uprising in a small village and what war between neighbors actually means, with executions and mass killings.

Why could’t Pilar narrate the book, I started to think more often as the book progressed: her stories are actually interesting and touching, and she is a very interesting character as even the narrator himself notes:
“You are a very hard woman,” he told her.
“No,” Pilar said. “But so simple I am very complicated.
Another thing I wondered about was if bull fighting really such a thing, I mean everything anyone is reminiscent about seems related to bull fighting any half of the metaphors are about how fighting the fascists is as a lost case as the bull charging into the arena.

Sometimes the writing has an excessive feel of and/then, and in general I thought this was really a slow book, but then there is a brilliant chapter 27 about a siege of a hill and I was compelled to read on. Maria with her trauma has more depth than I thought, and even if chapter 37 has a horribly protracted yet oblique sexscene but also fine observations about life in general:
How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.

Overall I felt this classic was a mixed bag, with the glimmers of brilliance in various chapters, including Chapter 42 which clear eyed shows the futility of ideology and the stupidity of the war, the helplessness and power hunger of those in charge, not being enough to make this an engaging read.

Quotes:
Plenty overwhelmed. Golz was gay and he had wanted him to be gay too before he left, but he hadn’t been.
All the best ones, when you thought it over, were gay. It was much better to be gay and it was a sign of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive. That was a complicated one. - I know it's a bit high school of me, but I found this usage of the word gay (not to mention hotel Gaylords) unintentionally hilarious in the solemnity of Hemingway his writing.

"It is not cowardly to know what is foolish.”
“Neither is it foolish to know what is cowardly,”

Your nationality and politics didn’t show when you’re dead

It was easier to be part of a regime than to fight it

Why don’t you ever think of how it is to win? You’ve been on the defensive for so long that you can’t think of that. Sure. But that was before all that stuff went up this road. That was before all the planes came. Don’t be so naïve. But remember this that as long as we can hold them here we keep the fascists tied up. They can’t attack any other country until they finish with us and they can never finish with us. If the French help at all, if only they leave the frontier open and if we get planes from America they can never finish with us. Never, if we get anything at all. These people will fight forever if they’re well armed.

No you must not expect victory here, not for several years maybe. This is just a holding attack. You must not get illusions about it now. Suppose we got a break-through today? This is our first big attack. Keep your sense of proportion. But what if we should have it? Don’t

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.

He looked down the hill slope again and he thought, I hate to leave it, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I have tried to with what talent I had. Have, you mean. All right, have.

I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. 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. And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life.

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

“For what are we born if not to aid one another?”

The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936-39. (WWII was fought from 1939-1945, just for a frame of reference). When an initial military coup in Spain failed to win control of the entire country, a bloody civil war ensued. The Nationalists, as the rebels were called, received aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Republicans (with whom our hero Robert Jordan fought) received aid from the Soviet Union as well as a group called The International Brigades, composed of volunteers from Europe and the US.

Ernest Hemingway was in Spain to cover the civil war as a journalist, and some of what he features in For Whom the Bell Tolls, his (fictional) book that takes place during that civil war, is informed by his research there, as well as his general anti-fascist commitments.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the five central/most important works from the Nobel Prize-winning author from Oak Park, Illinois (where I am now living, the reviewer says, as if Hem had been one of his personal best friends), including also The Sun Also Rises (also taking place in Papa’s beloved Spain, in Pamplona, during the Festival, the Running of the Bulls, focused on a group of drunken revelers including a Hem stand-in); A Farewell to Arms (set during the Italian campaign of WWI, where Frederick Henry has a torrid affair with Catherine Barkley; Hem was an ambulance driver in Italy in WWI, injuring himself and creating the conditions for his novel Farewell, as he fell in love with his nurse while in the hospital: so a war romance); The Old Man and the Sea (a story about an aging fisherman in Cuba and the fish of his life, a marlin), and last but I think his greatest accomplishment, his Collected Stories.

I know a lot of people don’t like Hem now; his treatment of women is seen by many as shallow, romanticized. Is it his macho (bi-polar, some now suspect) personality? Something about his drinking? The no trophy hunting and romanticizing of bull fighting? His satirizably minimalist prose? I dunno, I get all that, but in returning to this book, I still think it is a great novel, one of his literary triumphs.

The Spanish Civil War was a kind of precursor to WWII’s fight against totalitarianism/fascism--Hitler, Mussolini--though in Spain it was Franco. FWTBT is an impassioned plea, published in 1940 just after the second World War began, but before the US was quite committed to it, to fight the forces of fascism worldwide. One could argue that the revolution fell short in Spain, but Hem made the moral case for it in his novel, nevertheless. You have to fight fascism, making war a necessary evil.

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.”

The story is about a University of Colorado Spanish instructor, Robert Jordan, who volunteers, as did many Americans and others from many countries, against Franco. On one level it is a micro-focused close-up story of three days focused on one incident, the blowing of one bridge by Jordan, aided by a ragtag band of guerillas, gypsies, undermanned and beleaguered. It’s also the story of a three-day romance between Jordan and Maria, a but it also includes some finely-etched characters: Pilar, the matriarchal peasant leader, her drunk husband Pablo, the beloved pacifist guide Anselmo. We spend a long time getting ready for an attack that will occasion the dynamiting of the bridge, one small moment in a larger conflict.

The book is hampered by language censorship of the period, so one has to guess what words Hem has in mind when he writes, “I obscenity in the milk of thy mother’s obscenity,” and so on. Which can be annoying, but also amusing sometimes. And maybe the nineteen-year-old Maria is not any more admirable as a female romantic figure than Cat is in Farewell to Arms, but to me the romance really still works after all these years in my re-reading of it. Maybe the effort Hem makes to distinguish between the formal and informal address in Spanish can be a bit annoying, too many “thous” and “thees.” Maybe the stream of consciousness reflection for Jordan goes on too long at times, sure.

But there are powerful scenes in this book that indict the fascists, and also one unforgettable story from Pilar that also indicts the resistance in its cruel killing of some rich fascists in one town, incidents she herself observed. There’s a good Catch 22-like view of the dangers of military miscommunication that goes on behind the lines as Jordan needs to warn the leader Golz that the planned attack must be delayed.

One interesting aspect of the book is the degree to which psychic phenomena can be relied on in living one’s life. Pilar, a person Jordan truly respects as (otherwise) wise, reads his palm and sees a dark future for him; he, typically a rationalist, dismisses any such prophecies as silly superstition. Yet when he makes love with Maria and “the earth moves,” he is unskeptical about the mysteries of love:

“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.”

“What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.”

Does that sound like a rationalist?! He’s a realist about war and death, but he’s also a romantic existentialist when it comes to love:

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”

Jordan (and maybe Hem) can’t finally completely dismiss the mystical way his group of gypsies, guerrillas and vagabonds often see the world. He's also about mystery in many ways.

Finally, Jordan/Hemingway is persuasive and admirable when he makes a case for fighting against fascism wherever it rises up:

“It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was as authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at León and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado.”

Interestingly enough, Jordan also talks with the guerillas about fascism in the US:

“But are there not many fascists in your country?"
"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”

This is, to me, a great novel, very inspiring and moving with great lyrical passages.

A little better than Hemingway's other books, but that does not say much. For Whom the Bell Tolls has all the Hemingway staples: an obsession with war and violence, an over-idealization of romantic love, and lackluster writing. But he does improve in some areas from his past books. He includes Pilar, a complex and empowered woman whose strength sets her apart from Hemingway's more meek, modest female characters. Hemingway also makes Robert Jordan, our protagonist, a little more thoughtful, as he questions the ethics of killing people and whether the act should bring pleasure. He also tries to curtail his anger, thus deepening his relationship with masculinity in a much needed way in comparison to Hemingway's other stolid male characters.

Overall, I would not recommend For Whom the Bell Tolls unless you like reading about people fighting each other and/or about insta-love. Hemingway shows his lack of versatility as a writer through his novels as they all revolve around the same themes. I wonder what he would have written about if he had been born in a different time.

Que decir de este libro de Hemingway, el cual me ha encantado y enganchado.
Lo tiene todo: una obra antibélica y antifascista, defensora de valores democráticos, que reflexiona sobre el ser humano y sus diversas ideologías, con una bella historia de amor y lealtad,...todo ambientado en mi querida Segovia.
Me quedo un poco huérfana, porque cada vez me quedan menos obras que descubrir de este genial autor.
Sin duda me quedo con el poema que abre el libro y que le da todo su sentido:
"Ninguna persona es una isla; la muerte de cualquiera me afecta, porque me encuentro unido a toda la humanidad; por eso, nunca preguntes por quién doblan las campanas; doblan por ti."

شبیه وداع با اسلحه بود؛ جنگ و عشق و پایانی تلخ. البته اونو بیشتر دوست داشتم

What a novel this is! The greatest war story of the 20th century, perhaps.

There is much strength in this story. The characters – after reading, one will never forget the powerful Pilar; she dominates every scene. I found her to be the central instrumental emotion of the book.

The writing is unique, exquisite, and compassionate. The settings in the pine forest, the eating, the wine; all take you right there. The dialogue creates tautness throughout, like a cord stretched to the limit. Throughout I felt I was feeling these interacting characters. There is both a tenderness and a brutality all weaved together, depicting to us this microscopic vision of the Spanish Civil War.

What is remarkable is that this 450 page novel covers only three days in the lives of the people in this drama. Time becomes an expanded experience of life’s many details in this small frame period.

عاشقانه ای در جنگ، صمیمیت با هم بودن، خوشی در لحظه ....
فوق‌العاده بود. خیلی دوست داشتم

آخ آخ آخ
باز هم افتادم به تور آقای همینگوی بزرگ و چه کرد با دل من.
کتاب به قدری فوق العاده است که در وصف نگنجد . الحق و الانصاف از آن آثار بزرگ و ماندگار است ، ماندگار در تاریخ ادبیات و ذهن خواننده.
داستان جوانی آرمان گرا در جنگ داخلی اسپانیا جایی پشت خطوط فاشیست ها و در راه و ماموریتی برای نابودی یک پل . یک پل کوفتی لعنتی .
توقعاتم به غایت بالا بود وقتی شروعش کردم و کاملا هم این توقعات برآورده شدند تا یک بار دیگر آقای همینگوی ، نشان دهد در کتاب خانه من یکی از ارباب هاست.
فوق العاده است تا نخوانید ندانید . توضیح خیلی خوبی از آدم های درون جنگ و فرم و شکل جنگ های پارتیزانی هم دارد . یادتان باشد همینگوی در جنگ داخلی اسپانیا حضور داشت و آنجا خبرنگاری می کرد.