FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

Rating:
Summary: Astounding
Review: When I read this book, I was astonished. How could a book be so amazing, so perfect? How could such a collection of words come from the mind of a man? This is the first Hemingway I have read and it will be the last so as not to risk tainting my impression of his genius with what must be relatively inferior works. Though I'm sure his other novels are great, I simply can't imagine them being on par with this absolute masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: A true masterpiece of human redemption
Review: It is not by mere circumstance that a novel is considered a classic. It takes years and years of the work standing up to critique, criticism, public response, and the test of time. The latter is perhaps the greatest of example of why Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is labeled among the great works of the twentieth century. This novel's moving and intense story has not lost meaning over the years of its existence. The romance and adventure appeals to fans of many different genres, but to call this book a war narrative is missing the scope and depth of the work by a long shot. Hemingway, as he does in many of his books, brings into view some of the most basic questions and sought-after answers that have always been at the heart of the nature of man. Hemingway explores the very simple yet profound principles of death and honor in this work, and his conclusions are by no means simple reflections.
While only occurring over the course of several days, the events that take place in For Whom the Bell Tolls, along with the superb style of writing, draw the reader into the world of Robert Jordan, the book's protagonist, while he attempts to destroy a fascist-controlled bridge, and along the way discovers humanity, love, and himself. This is possibly Hemingway's greatest feat in the novel: the creation of a connection between oneself and humanity; that we all share a responsibility with each other and that our honor lies in the hands of our neighbors.
As a fairly long book, For Whom the Bell Tolls is by no means a story for inexperienced or pedestrian readers, and even an older audience might find the plot tedious at some points. However, there is ample swashbuckling to satiate the thirst for adventure of any war genre fan, and plenty of romance to keep a reader of softer disposition happy. The journey is well worth the effort, and I would recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of great literature.

Rating:
Summary: Among the Finest Literature We Have
Review: Evocative, tragic, brutal, bitter. Using the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s as his backdrop, Hemmingway critiques warfare from the political abstractions and distant generals to the individual lives it destroys, and renders all in frighteningly powerful detail with every crosscurrent coming to bear on each character in ways that are viscerally wrenching, complex and yet clear. Every shade of character and dynamic is captured as several dozen people act out a small part in a large conflict in the two-and-a-half days of a mission to blow a bridge.

Robert Jordan, an American in the volunteer brigades, arrives deep in the mountain wilderness of Spain with orders to recruit and employ the services of irregular militia hiding out there in the vicinity of a small bridge that will be key to an impending offensive. His task requires that he win the hearts and minds of these locals in order to secure their loyalty so that he might have an effective small force for carrying out his mission. But this group of people are of conflicting feelings and understandings about their place in the conflict and what it means to each of them. Some are wary and some callous, some dedicated to the fight and others only dedicated to themselves.

We have real people-Anselmo's natural and true goodness, Pilar and El Sordo's dedication, Pablo's treachery, Maria's repeated loss of innocence. We have the politics and forces behind it all-selfish and hollow, or abstracted until it's no longer human. And we have warfare-sudden death, alone in the mountains, alone with your last thoughts, with the smell of burning flesh, with your last blood running silently into the dirt.

Hemmingway spares us the simplistic narrative style of describing each character's feelings. Instead, he offers the scenes themselves with such insightful observation and flawlessly rendered detail that every one of the many conflicting shifts of allegiance happening in Pablo's scheming mind is writ in his every gesture and expression and telling silence. Neither the characters nor the narrator ever need discuss these in so many words. The tensions among the characters as they huddle in their cave hideout are a fascinating web of unexpected assessments of each other, shifts of power and influence, tactical and strategic wins and loses. Though never spoken of, the delicacy and danger of Jordan's human task is clear. As a contrast there is Maria, at first seeming too childish until we realize Jordan's love for her is love for lost innocence, and that she in turn-only seventeen-has every right to her emotional fragility and her desperation.

And then there is the war itself, and here again Hemmingway's powers of observation and prose composition startle. Every action bears on every other, and the individuals are placed firmly in context from the cave to the local mountains to the whole of Spain to the abstractions of global political movements. Without a syllable of pedantry the author draws the relationship between each detail of individual action and the whole of the conflict. And vice versa, with ideals or their absence making each person's motives a little different, and often making helpless puppets of them all.

There is very little in literature to compare with For Whom the Bell Tolls. It sees humanity at its very best and very worst simultaneously, and sees it directly in vivid, glimmering images and beautifully textured emotional nuance, without wordy narrative telling the reader what to think and when. The fact that Hemmingway yet controls our understanding with absolute ease and clarity is only half of the writer's art. His critique of warfare and its human toll, expressed in Jordan's arc of hope and tragedy and resignation, is as brutal as the fear and blood on the ground, and ultimately contemplates the interconnectedness of life and the sacrifices made to sustain it. "No man is an islande, intire unto itselfe... Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." Among the finest literature we have.

Rating:
Summary: Still haunted by Hemingway
Review: "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was the first Hemingway I ever read. I was a high school kid in the early 1970s, working on my campus newspaper, newly graduated from Jack London but not yet ready for Jack Kerouac.

To my young eyes, it was a good action story: Robert Jordan, the passionate American teacher joins a band of armed gypsies in the Spanish Civil War. He believes one man can make a difference. The whole novel covers just 68 hours, during which Jordan must find a way to blow up a key bridge behind enemy lines. In that short time, Jordan also falls in love with Maria, a beautiful Spanish woman who has been raped by enemy soldiers. The whole spectrum of literature was refracted through the prism of my youth: Good guys and bad guys, sex and blood, life and death. For me, just a boy, the journey from abstraction to clarity was only just beginning.

Re-reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at 42 (roughly the age Hemingway was when he published it), I have lost my ability to see things clearly in black and white. My vision is blurred by irony, as I note that two enemies, the moral killer Anselmo and the sympathetic fascist Lieutenant Berrendo, utter the very same prayer. For the first time, I see that the book opens with Robert Jordan lying on the "pine-needled floor of the forest" and closes as he feels his heart pounding against the "pine needle floor of the forest"; Jordan ends as he begins, perhaps having never really moved. I certainly could never have seen at 16 how dying well might be more consequential than living well. And somehow the light has changed in the past 26 years, so that I now truly understand how the earth can move.

As a teen, I missed another crucial element, even though Vietnam was still a seeping wound. Three pivotal days in Jordan's life force him to question his own role in a futile war. He wonders if dying for a political cause might be too wasteful, but he ultimately believes that dying to save another individual is a man's most heroic act.

The book's title is taken from John Donne's celebrated poem: "No man is an Iland ... and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." It was not about loneliness and aloneness, as I once had thought, but about the seamless fabric of all life: What happens to one happens to all.

I am not blind to Hemingway's flaws. He was a good short writer, and what was short was almost always better. Pilar's tale on the mountainside has been widely acclaimed as the most powerful of Hemingway's prose. Her story within a story is nothing less than a contemporary myth.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" has also been regarded as Hemingway's capitulation to critics who barked that his innovative style was too lean, and as a consciously commercial exercise for which Hollywood might (and did) pay handsomely. Robert Jordan, in so many respects, was a tragic mythical hero in the vein of Achilles, Gawain and Samson. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" ranks as one of the great American war novels in a country that has always struggled with the concept of good and bad wars.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book About War, Love, and Devotion to Duty
Review: For Whom the Bell Tolls is a great book with large themes: war, love, devotion to duty, and the clash between modern, rational values and more traditional ones. At a higher level, it is about connections between people: indeed, the book opens with the following quotation from John Donne:

. . . 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.

Hemingway takes us inside a guerilla band during the Spanish Civil War, mostly through the eyes of Robert Jordan, an American professor-cum-demolitions expert. Jordan is a Communist - at least he is strongly drawn to Communism - who has come to Spain to fight fascism. He has character and a sense of duty. Since, from our vantage point, at the beginning of the 21st century, it seems that not many people do, this gives the book a kind of "long ago and far away" feel. Readers in 1940, when the book was published, no doubt experienced it in a more immediate way.

This book includes many memorable secondary characters: among them Pilar, the wise leader of the band of partisans, Pablo, her drunken, amoral, but capable husband, and Maria, the love interest in the story.

Like every Hemingway novel that I've read, this one is well written. Hemingway uses the archaic English "thou" for the Spanish "tu" and translates literally from Spanish to English to better convey an impression of Spanish dialogue to English readers. These devices are initially distracting but are actually very successful at taking the reader inside the minds of the Spanish-speaking characters in this book.

This is a distinguished work and an exciting one. It deserves its acclaim.

Rating:
Summary: Emotional depiction about the calamities of war
Review: The book is about an American dynamiter, Robert Jordan, who embeds himself with a republican guerilla group. His mission was to blow up a bridge controlled by a fascist soldiers. But the context of the story wasn't really focused on the Spanish Civil War but rather the toils and calamities of war in general. War took an emotional toll on the partisans and the book does a good job explaining the background of the characters. There is also some humanity even in the midst of the war. To take the edge of the harsh plot of the story, Jordan meets Maria, another victim of the war. Her father and mother were killed in cold blood when fascist had captured their town while she fell captive under the fascists.
One can suspect that the book was published for a wide audience at its first printing because of the censoring and substitution of the word "obscenity". This book probably had an impact for the raw emotion for its audience but yet the book was written before WWII and the Vietnam War--wars that brought in Americans center stage to the battlefront in the 20th century. In fact blitzkrieg battle tactics made famous by Hilter's German army were perfected on the grounds of the Spanish Civil War. But the onset of these subsequent war pushed aside the Spanish Civil War aside from the American memory of historical events. I would think that by this reasoning, that a book like this would stand the test of time if it had some uniqueness, something unique about the war that couldn't be compared to any other war like fighting on the basis of an ideological idea (fascism, republicanism, socialism, etc.) instead of by ethnic ties or religious beliefs. Otherwise, the story just sounds like another wishy washy critique about war itself and how destructive it is which has been written by many other writers of the twentieth century. Nevertheless I applaud the raw writing talent of Hemingway and admire his storytelling but I wouldn't think that a typical reader today would feel that this book was really cutting edge.

Rating:
Summary: good descriptions of the calamities of war
Review: The book chronicles an American dynamiter's mission to blow up a bridge controlled by Spanish fascists. The book doesn't focus on the war as a whole but rather on the toll war takes on the people living in it. The main character, Robert Jordan, bands with a guerilla group of which the war took its toll. One man once a great fighter has now become a hopeless drunk who's only form of comfort other than the bottle is taking care of horses left behind. His wife who had been beautiful once now has aged and lost her vivacity. Another young woman lost her parents in a brutal confrontation with fascist forces and dehumanized in the process. Hemingway's style of writing was a little too wishy washy but some of his emotional descriptions of the things that happened were intriguing. Two of the more emotional scenes were some of the characters flashbacks of what they had gone through during the war mainly having to do with killing an enemy and being captured by an enemy. There have been many stories about war and although war isn't something anyone can be used to this book took a perspective that has been thoroughly explored by today's standards. At the time the book was written there was a lot of censoring where the word "obscenity" was substituted hence the book was intended for a wide audience. During Hemingway's time it is understandable how this book can be grappling to an American audience. But since then World War II and the Vietnam War have pushed aside this conflict in the minds of Americans with their tales of calamity and loss and pretty much reiterating the themes of Hemingway's book. This is the reason why a typical American reader may not find pathos for the book. Maybe if the book talk more about Franco, ideologies and the bigger picture of the context of the war then it may be more interesting to contemporary readers. But this book still has a story that will be valuable for future generation. In other words, this is a good book for students.

Rating:
Summary: No man is an Iland ...
Review: I like this Hemingway book even better than A Farewell to Arms. It "stayed with me" long after I had forgotten most of the details. I read the book as a university freshman, then reread it after it came strongly to mind in summer 1987. I was standing on a steep, green meadow in Schwarzwald, reshuffling the deck of life. Like a Hemingway character, I was traveling around Europe living an adventure.

Descriptions of many scenes are memorable. Reading as a twenty year old, dynamiting the bridge and the part where Maria crawls under the blanket with Robert Jordan were the strongest. One still likes those descriptions twenty-five years later, but one then also pays attention to the long description of old dead roses as the essence of the odor of death. And one never forgets the powerful ending. Here's how I remembered the ending before rereading it yesterday: Robert Jordan, mortally wounded, sends the pregnant Maria toward safety with the rest of his escaping band of comrades. Lying on his stomach on the steep meadow, as Franco's fascist troops come up the hillside into sight, he pulls back the bolt and takes a bead on the lead officer on horseback ....

Because all dialogues in the book should take place in Spanish, Hemingway wrote partly in the early seventeenth century English of John Donne (readers familiar with the king James Version of the Bible, translated early in the seventeenth century, will easily recognize the language). This has the advantage of giving the reader the sensation of reading 'not-English'.

It's still a very powerful book. In the context of history, Hemingway was impregnated with the Teddy Roosevelt brand of heroism.

Rating:
Summary: You cannot beat this!
Review: Having read two Hemmingway novels, I was not impressed. Frankly, I was surprised that I did not enjoy them. After growing up and hearing about the great Hemmingway, the man's man, I found his characters weak and whinny. Ready to give up, I gave him one more try and I am glad he did. This is a magnificent novel.

Set in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s it tells the story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer fighting against Franco and his fascist allies. This is first-rate story telling, it grabs the reader from the offset and pulls him into the story. Unlike other Hemmingway novels (i.e., The Son Also Rises), these are heroic characters that we deeply care about.

The imagery is magnificent. I can still see in my minds eye, the retreating Republicans, the panicked soldiers, the horses out of control and the cartridge casings spilled in the road way. If you are unfamiliar with Hemmingway, read this book first. All the others will pale in comparison.

Rating:
Summary: Truthful and entertaining. A brilliant must-read novel.
Review: Remarkable. This is a truthful and captivating tale of the Spanish Civil War (The republic against fascists) Hemingway, chose to center the story around a guerrilla group fighting behind enemy lines, as well an American dynamiter, Robert Jordan, who joins forces to take up a mission that may cost their lives. The story is set up straight away as Robert Jordan is introduced to each of the members of the small guerilla band(under 10 members), then the plot slows down a bit when the initial planning of the mission is taking place.

Complications in this mission weave the plot: from a dreaded conspiracy and sell-out, to an unexpected romance. Robert Jordan is caught in many dilemmas, as he falls in love with a girl during his time with the guerrilla group, and now he faces the fear of dying and leaving someone that he loves behind. Jordan¡¦s internal monologue in this book does wonders in his contemplation of what is right and wrong, and trying to figure out what is important: duty against love, the cause of the Republic against the lives of the partisans--the very people that he had become close friends with. I think all this builds up the suspense and the fear for what may become of the characters.

There are quick shifts between past and present in this long novel that actually only spans a mere three days. Flashbacks of Robert Jordan¡¦s grandfather and father, tells us a lot about his character and the reason that he fights in this war. And stories of each of the characters past, brings us closer to understanding each of the band members.
The horrible story by the woman Pilar shows us that there is no such thing as ¡§the good side¡¨ or ¡§the bad side¡¨ in war; war itself is evil. The morality of war is also briefly discussed, along with an old man¡¦s fears of taking the life of another. Then of course there is the general question that is on the minds of all the characters: When will this all end?

What I especially like about this book is its unique and brilliant dialogue. Hemingway directly translates Spanish into English, resulting in an awkward, but strangely realistic speech, providing fuel for the story¡¦s atmosphere.

And all this leads to the explosive climax, with El Sordo¡¦s last stand, the blowing of the bridge, and the attempt to escape. It is brilliantly descriptive, and has a well set-up plot that will make you pray for the characters to come out of it alive. The suspense is unbearable. This book is definitely a page-turner and perhaps one of Hemingway¡¦s best works after The Sun Also Rises.