For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), by Ernest Hemingway

 

I encountered For Whom The Bell Tolls first in 2007, when I borrowed the audio book read by Campbell Scott from the library, and I liked it so much that I bought my own copy and have listened to it two or three times since then.  It's my book of choice for long haul flights, because it doesn't matter if I nod off—I know every word of the plot by now and it's the timbre of Scott's voice and his masterful rendition of the thoughts of Robert Jordan that I love to listen to.

That made it the perfect choice for bedtime 'reading' during my recovery from eye surgery.  In the beginning I was taking heavy-duty painkillers so I did indeed nod off,  and I listened to more than one of the sixteen CDs two or three times, savouring every word of the story yet unable to stay awake to the end of them.  Which is why it has taken almost four weeks to finish the book...

There are many things to love about For Whom The Bell Tolls.  It's a story about high idealism, and about the doomed courage of the people who fought against Franco's militarily superior fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).  The central character Robert Jordan is a young academic who teaches Spanish, and he joins the defence of the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic, which was supported by workers, peasants and by the Soviet Union because of its land reforms.  (I owe some of what I know about the Spanish Civil War from a most informative short course run by Graham Pratt at the Hawthorn U3A).  The novel traces Jordan's journey both literal and psychological as he follows orders to travel behind enemy lines and destroy a bridge in order to frustrate a forthcoming offensive.

Under the command of the Soviet General Golz, Jordan joins up with a band of local anti-fascist guerrillas to undertake his mission.  At the beginning of the story he has no fear of danger because he places no great value on his own life.  He is fighting for a greater good, the principle of democracy and an equitable division of a nation's wealth, and is prepared to sacrifice his own life for the cause.  But although at the beginning of his mission he tells General Golz he has no time for girls, when he falls for Maria in the guerrilla camp his perspective shifts.  His life—and hers even more so—begin to matter.  Through his internal dialogues, the novel traces Jordan's transition from dispassionate acceptance that lives must be sacrificed to an emotional epiphany that it is not so simple.

In contrast to Jordan's idealism is Pablo, the leader of the guerrilla camp. He is brusque and rude, and is prepared to frustrate Jordan's operation because it poses a risk to the surviving forces in the mountains.  He knows that if the bridge is blown up, the fascists will hunt them down in retaliation.  He knows that the Republic is doomed, and there are few places of safety left.  Anselmo, a much older guerrilla fighter, scorns him as one who was once a great warrior but is now only concerned with himself, but it is Pablo who speaks the truth about the war. Whereas General Golz complains that their problems are lack of coherent organisation and a fractured command structure, Pablo articulates why the Republicans failed: it was because they were militarily inferior in every way.  They were outclassed in the air, their weapons were pitiful, and even the beautiful cavalry horses they stole from the enemy had injuries.  As the novel progresses, we see that the enemy has tanks and artillery; the guerrillas do not even know what these weapons are.

Within the guerrilla band, Jordan has to rely on illiterate men who cannot read identity passes, or record the movement of enemy personnel or remember passwords.  Their hope and naiveté is charming and often droll, but some of them—like the light-hearted gypsy Rafael—do not understand what is at stake and are unreliable in critical ways.  Surprisingly—since Hemingway has a reputation for hyper-masculinity and his representation of Maria's seemingly premature resilience after gang-rape by the fascists is problematic—his characterisation of Pilar, the mujer [woman] of Pablo, is impressive.  From the outset she displaces Pablo as the leader of the guerrilla band.  Like a model for a granite monument, she is fiercely loyal and utterly reliable.  A patriot who has supported the republic since the beginning, she runs her unruly 'household' in the cave with a firm grip; and while she performs housewifely duties like cooking and mending and the mothering of the traumatised Maria, Robert Jordan trusts Pilar from the moment he meets her and recognises her authority.  She understands tactics, and she knows the risks, but she never hesitates to cooperate with Robert Jordan's orders from above.  She is astonishingly brave.

A word about the language: the narrative is written in third-person limited omniscient mode, but in two very different narrative styles.  Robert Jordan's inner thoughts are rendered in everyday American English, but all the dialogue amongst the guerrilla band takes place in Spanish.  To achieve this Hemingway renders Spanish singular forms with the archaic English thee and thou and very formal grammatical structures.  What seem like quaint grammatical forms—such as the possessive with the woman of Pablo rather than 'Pablo's woman'—reinforce that Jordan is an outsider translating from one language to another.

You can see the somewhat stilted effect here: I have quoted this excerpt from Wikipedia since I was listening to an audio book, not reading the book.  (Though I do have a first edition, which I found in a country bookshop.  It's the most expensive book in my collection).

'It is possible.'
'Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here.'
'Yes, we will have to fight.'
'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.'  (Wikipedia cites this from pp. 207-8 of the edition they were using, published in 1940 by Charles Scribner).

Another stylistic feature of note is that while some of his characters swear vociferously their blasphemies and oaths are rendered using the words 'unprintable' and 'obscenity.'  (You can read more about this at Wikipedia.) This may have been a way of rendering the authentic crudity of the peasants without running foul of censors, but the overall effect is to give the text a somewhat Biblical feel, or perhaps an allusion to John Donne's 17th century Meditation XVII, from which the novel takes its name.

No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, by John Donne, 1624, see Wikipedia.) 

I love this book, and I love this narration by Campbell Scott.  When I can't sleep, I listen to it all over again.

Author: Ernest Hemingway
Title: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Narrated by Campbell Scott
Publisher: Simon Schuster Audio, 2006, first published 1940
ISBN: 9780743564380
Personal library. 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers

 

Hemingway, Ernest "To Have and Have Not" - 1937

1937

 

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read


 

Some people have it, others don't. Money. That is the main subject of this story. Harry Morgan belongs to the latter category and needs to find ideas to support his family.

Hemingway's love for Cuba is probably the reason for the main setting though this might have taken place in many parts of the world.

I don't think this is the author's greatest book and am glad it wasn't the first one I read. While the story itself is interesting, it goes all a little higgledy-piggledy, especially towards the end. You can't help but wonder whether Mr. Hemingway just wanted to finish this one. Apparently, he considered it his worst one.

He was still a great author.

Comments from the discussion:

• Most people agreed the characters were not likeable, but we had a lot of thoughts on the settings and time and place in history, as well as about Hemingway's writing style and how it was formed and how it influenced writing of the future.
  
  
• His writing was not really to my taste, nor his characters, I can see how he is well regarded as an author while he just isn't a great fit for me personally. Still I am now able to say I have read something by him, and it will be a good reference point while reading similar genres in the future someday.

We read this in our international online book club in June 2023.

From the back cover:

"Hemingway's Classic Novel About Smuggling, Intrigue, and Love

To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.

Harshly realistic, yet with one of the most subtle and moving relationships in the Hemingway oeuvre, To Have and Have Not is literary high adventure at its finest."

Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in 'The Old Man and the Sea' and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style".



Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is listed in 1001 Books for

• The Sun Also Rises (1926), see my thoughts here
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• To Have and Have Not (1937)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), see my thoughts here
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952, read ages ago pre-blog)

(I've also reviewed 'Out of Season' (1923), a short story which is said to mark a turning point in his writing. Now, I know it's fashionable to deride Hemingway because he's 'a dead white male' and is guilty of flaws typical of his generation.  Critics of A Farewell to Arms also like to snipe that the realism of his war scenes are not authentic because (as 1001 Books somewhat pompously says) the novelist's combat experience was more limited than that of his protagonist.  But so what?  He is a marvellous writer.  My favourite is For Whom the Bell Tolls, but A Farewell to Arms is very good too. There is a brief moment when the Italians are retreating that exemplifies Hemingway's terse depiction of the brutality of war, drawing our attention to something we might not have understood about the exigencies of warfare. Frederic is seeking instructions for what to do with the wounded.

'The orders are that we stay here.  You clear the wounded from here to the clearing station.' 'Sometimes we clear from the clearing station to the field hospitals too,' I said. 'Tell me, I have never seen a retreat—if there is a retreat how are all the wounded evacuated?' 'They are not.  They take as many as they can and leave the rest.' 'What will I take in the cars?' 'Hospital equipment.' (p.187 of  my print edition, Scriber 2003.)

We all know that WW1 was a slaughterhouse, but I was not aware that wounded men were left behind at the mercy of the advancing Germans.  All those bereaved wives and mothers who were told that their men 'died immediately and would not have felt a thing' must have recoiled in horror when they read that scene. OTOH There's also some vulgar conversations about women which grate, and the preoccupation with drinking isn't very interesting either.  The love affair between Catherine and Frederic tested my patience a bit.  I had made a short note to the effect that Catherine's submissiveness is tiresome and the soppy love talk was boring, so I was not surprised it described as 'sentimental' in 1001 Books:

A Farewell to Arms is set in Italy and Switzerland during the First World War.  The very sparse and unadorned style of Hemingway's narrator Frederic Henry provides a realistic and unromanticised account of war on the Italian front and is typical of the writing style that was to become the hallmark of Hemingway's later writing.  Henry's descriptions of war are in sharp relief to the sentimental language of his affair with Catherine, an English nurse he meets while recovering from an injury in Turin.  (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, ABC Books, 2006 Edition, ISBN: 9780733321214, p 341.)

The narration by John Slattery is generally very good, but the upper class English accents are not very convincing.  Also, (though no fault of the narration but rather just a feature of audiobooks which don't scamper over text the way that the eye can), there's quite a bit of repetitive dialogue, which probably wouldn't be as noticeable or irritating in the written text. But this is an early novel... A Farewell to Arms was made into a film in 1932.  

 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

 Author: Ernest Hemingway
Title: A Farewell to Arms
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006, first published 1929
Narrated by John Slattery ISBN: 9780743564373, 8 CDs
Source: Kingston Library (though I have a print edition too.)

Hemingway, Ernest "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

 1940

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read


After reading this book, I don't understand why I didn't read it earlier. This is one of the "must read" classics, a book that tells us so much about a terrible time, not just a particular terrible time about the guerillas in the Spanish Civil War, but about war in general. War isn't jsut a number of how many people died or how many fights were won or lost. War is horrible. War is brutal. War is everything nobody wants. And yet, we still have wars.

You can tell that a lot of experience flowed into this piece. Ernest Hemingway faught himself in the Spanish Civil War. He must have lived through lot of the actions described here.

This novel is a brilliant account of the partisans, their fight, their effort, their dreams. A strong story about a fight that we all know was lost and cost many Spaniards dearly in the following years.

I never watched the movie with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, two actors I really loved. I probably should. They received nine Oscar nominations for it.

From the back cover: 

"High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a band of anti-fascist guerrilla prepares to blow up a strategically vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels."

Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in 'The Old Man and the Sea' and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style" and the Pulitzer Prize for "The Old Man and the Sea" in 1953.

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

A review by Small Talk

It is a magical time and place - Paris in the twenties. Hemingway is a struggling young writer. There is little money and he has a wife and baby to support. But he is part of a set of writers and artists who are or will be household names. It’s literary voyeurism at its best.

A Moveable Feast was published after Hemingway’s death. A set of sketches of his time in Paris during his first marriage with Hadley, it shows us a Hemingway trying to become the Hemingway the world knows today, crafting his literary style, making and discarding friends, building up to the nastiness and the greatness he became known for later. The title is taken from something he said about Paris - “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

In a lot of ways, Paris is the hero of the book. It’s a Paris that has probably all but disappeared a long time ago - a place where a struggling young artist could live cheaply and well, where there was Sylvia Beach and her book shop providing literary sustenance, where Ezra Pound created a fund to save TS Eliot from his bank job to allow him to write full time, where there are cafes to write in and parks to walk through, where there would always be a fellow-writer to go on trips with. It’s lovely and romantic, especially when you know your writing is going well, and you feel the world is there for the taking. Watching a beautiful young woman waiting for someone in a cafe he is writing in, Hemingway says “I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and pencil.” It’s heady!

He writes about the famous figures he encounters. He doesn’t flatter, he is downright nasty sometimes. Fitzgerald is weak and a drunk, Zelda undermines his confidence, jealous of his writing and scornful of his manhood. His novel The Great Gatsby is pure genius and just for that Hemingway is willing to forgive him anything. Ford Maddox Ford has terrible breath and lies all the time and is disliked intensely by Hemingway. Ezra Pound is generous to a fault, even to writers not deserving of it. Gertrude Stein has regressive views on homosexuality, she plays favourites with the writers and artists invited to her home, and she has a falling out with Hemingway. James Joyce is a hero who frequents a restaurant Hemingway cannot afford, yet he attempts to go there hoping to catch a glimpse. All of this is terribly interesting and voyeuristic and is the literary equivalent of People magazine.

But what binds me to this book is Hemingway’s notes on his writing progress and his own consciousness of the purpose of his life - the writing, always the writing. “The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of cafe cremes, the smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping and luck were all you needed.” It does not matter that he is poor and has sometimes to go hungry. It does not matter that the artists and famous people he meets always manage to disappoint him. He is writing and writing well. “Do not worry,” he tells himself, “ You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Hemingway is probably describing the happiest time of his life - married to Hadley whom he loves, probably the only woman he ever truly loved, living in beautiful Paris, moving among probable geniuses, and crafting his own literary legacy. It is a deeply evocative book. An older Hemingway manages to capture a more innocent time, a time when anything seemed possible, when everything seemed a bit more clear.

To be young and in Paris. It’s pure heaven. Especially when an adult you knows how it’s all going to end.

Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

1952

Reviewed by Marianne from "Let's Read"

"The Old Man and the Sea", always sounds a little exotic, a little adventurous, a little romantic, I love that title.

An ageing fisherman who hits a stroke of bad luck, doesn't catch anything for ages, goes out to sea and catches the probably largest fish he has ever set eyes on. What follows is his struggle to bring the fish home. Alone. The description of his efforts, of his problems, are just fantastic. A great book, I'm not surprised about the success. Wonderful writing, you can imagine being there with Santiago, the fisherman, in his boat. Although, he'd probably make you work and help him get the fish back home. …

Apparently, this was one of the main reasons, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I can understand that. Such beauty!

From the back cover: "The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal; a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss. Written in 1952, this hugely successful novella confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature."

Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in 'The Old Man and the Sea' and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style" and the Pulitzer Prize for “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1953. 

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Hemingway, Ernest "A Moveable Feast"

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

I’ve struggled quite a lot with this memoir about life in 1920’s Paris. Not the writing style – I actually don’t mind Hemingway’s pared back, non-descriptive language. And I love all things Paris.

There’s something about Hemingway himself – the man comes across as being a pompous, self-righteous old git!

As I moved through A Moveable Feast I realised that I didn’t trust Hemingway’s observations or opinions of other people. I didn’t believe what he was telling me. It felt like I was reading the self-justifications of a dying man.

Perhaps The Paris Wife and Hadley’s side of the story was still too close to my heart. Whatever the reason, the end result was the same; Hemingway failed to move me.

Hemingway may be a great American writer – profound, respected and influential – three words I kept coming across when I goggled him, but I failed to connect to him at all. Sadly, in Hemingway’s hands, even Paris seemed like a bland, any-city entity. I didn’t get from his writing why Paris was his ‘moveable feast’; why it was so influential and significant within the course of his life that he wanted to write a book about it.

But I think the part I struggled with the most was his dialogue. The language and the actual conversations seemed stilted and pointless. They rarely moved the story on or revealed anything significant.

A Moveable Feast has left me with no compulsion to read anything else by Hemingway, certainly not anymore memoirs or biographies. But I will continue to read all I can about Paris itself! My edition was published 2012; originally published in 1964. 

Hemingway’s memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the twenties are deeply personal, warmly affectionate, and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him – James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – he recalls the time when, poor, happy, and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation. Written during the last years of Hemingway’s life, his memoir is a lively and powerful reflection of his genius that scintillates with the romance of the city.

• Originally posted by Brona @This Reading Life

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway’s first serious success – published in 1926, only four years after James Joyce’s Ulysses.  It is hard to imagine two books less like each other than these: Joyce, the great Irish modernist, exploring the limits of language (not to mention the patience and fortitude of his readers) and Hemingway, the great American exponent of plain language and tough, terse prose.

I read and blogged this book on November 18th 2009.  To see the rest of my thoughts about this book, please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/the-sun-also-rises-by-ernest-hemingway/

Rebecca's 2008 Progress

I've read five Nobel Prize authors, six books in 2008. I've posted a few here, but I've neglected to post the others on this site. Here are links to all of them if you're interested.

• East of Eden by Steinbeck (I read this in March, before I began book blogging. Technically, I guess that doesn't count because it was before I "joined" Read the Nobels.)
• Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (on Read the Nobels)
• Life and Times of Michael K (on Read the Nobels)
• Speeches of Winston Churchill (on Read the Nobels)
• The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book by Kipling (on Rebecca Reads)
• The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway (on Rebecca Reads)

I don't think I'll be reading any more this year, but I have a number of them up in my reading line up for next year.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
128 pages


When reviewing a classic like The Old Man and the Sea, it's difficult to find something to say that hasn't already been said. This concise novella packs a punch in 128 short pages. Santiago is the old man in the title, a Cuban fisherman who has gone more than 80 days without a catch. He's a lonely man, ridiculed by other fishermen and forced to fish alone after losing his assistant (forced by his parents to fish with another, luckier, fisherman). Santiago decides to go further out into the sea than the other fishermen and, sure enough, snags a marlin larger than his boat.

The rest of the book recounts Santiago's efforts to reel in the fish (this task alone takes more than a day), and then bring the fish back to port. He demonstrates powerful mental and physical strength as he combats the marlin, sharks, hunger, fatigue, and loneliness. Much has been written about this work's themes of pride and redemption, and comparisons to Hemingway's late career. And while there are certainly symbols and messages in this book, it's also a great story that holds your attention the entire way through. ( )

My original review can be found here.

For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

...And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. - John Donne-

For Whom The Bell Tolls is first and foremost a war novel. Spanning a scant three days, the novel is the story of Robert Jordan - a young American professor - who is attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. Jordan's mission is to blow up a bridge which is guarded by the fascists. He enlists the aid of a band of Communist guerillas, spending several days with them at a cave in the mountains.

Hemingway introduces a broad range of characters, including Maria - the beautiful Spanish girl with a tragic history - who Jordan falls in love with practically on sight. The novel has all the makings of a classic, and in fact has been called Hemingway's greatest work. Despite this, I found myself struggling to continue reading through the first half of the story.

Hemingway spends a great deal of time inside his character's heads, repetitively showing us their thoughts and motivations. The dialogue tends to plod along, filled with 'thees' and 'thous' and odd phrases such as:

"Go and obscenity thyself," Pablo told him. -From For Whom The Bell Tolls, page 211-

I found myself tempted to scan through large portions of the book during the early going, and only hard-nosed determination kept me reading.

Luckily, the book redeems itself around page 270, when finally the reader gets to experience some action. It is the latter pages that Hemingway shows his skill as a writer, painting the tragedy of war in broad strokes and revealing the humanity of his characters.

I wanted badly to love this book. I have enjoyed other Hemingway novels (The Old Man and The Sea, for example when I was in High School), and have been captivated by Hemingway's short stories. But, I'm afraid I cannot recommend this one. Had I not been reading this for a challenge and a group read, I would have quit less than 50 pages in. If the reader is diligent and can wade through the dryness of the first half of the book, they will be tragically rewarded in the end.

Rated 2/5.