For Whom The Bell Tolls

“Wipe the pap of your mother’s breast off thy lips and give me a hatful of that dirt,’ the man with his chin on the ground said. ‘No one of us will see the sun go down this night.”

― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

A tragic tale of woe and misfortune about an American who has been ordered to blow up a bridge.  Over the course of about three days we watch and listen as Robert Jordan and a band of Spanish Rebels prepare themselves for the battle to come.  Given the title, it should come as no surprise that many of these people will die, and yet, many of the deaths do come as a surprise.  Of course, Hemingway was always hard on his characters.

For Whom The Bell Tolls, like many novels from Hemingway and his contemporaries, is a greatly stylized work.  People speak oddly using a lot of Thees and Thous and other highly formalized constructs.  There is also the curious manner in which hash language is treated-the words obscenity or unprintable used in place of the actual obscenity.   The modern world’s lack of any sense of shame makes it seem profoundly quaint for these words to be so censored.

It’s hard for the modern reader to fully enjoy books which were meant to be more than a way to kill a dull afternoon.  It’s hard to image a writer that wants to do more than help you kill that dull afternoon.  Like Frankenstein and Moby Dick, For Whom The Bell Tolls goes into much more detail and character development than the average modern bestseller.  Every character we met has some back-story that explains who they are and why we find them here.  We often hear bits of random thoughts and Robert has lengthy conversations with himself.

For Whom The Bell Tolls wants you to slow down and think-even though the reading level has to be about the 6th grade.  This is a story that needs to be taken as a whole and the deceptively simple writing style makes that possible.  Hemingway is not for everyone and I almost left this one unfinished myself, but I’m glad I made it through to the end.  It’s a book worth reading, even if it can be a bit baffling at times.

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