Long Book Sad War

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

New York : Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995, c1940.

 471 p. ; 21 cm.     

I have to be honest, I didn't really plan to read this book, but after watching the PBS series on Hemingway, and then reading a book from our library about the Spanish Civil War, I was curious to read this novel of his. 

I found the PBS series problematic in many ways. It overly lionized Hemingway, and tended to minimize what an awful and incredibly sexist person he was.  But there was great footage and lots of other information worth taking in about this really important literary figure.  

I initially sat down to read just excerpts of the novel, but the writing is compelling and I ended up enjoying reading it, even when I felt like the movement of narrative was overly ponderous.  Like Mario Vargas Llosa in the documentary, I too felt that the love affair in the novel was overwrought, immature and something of a distraction.  However, the portrayal of characters in the guerrilla band that the main character works with and the ludicrous characters running the war for the Republic are really strong points of the novel.  Hemingway's ability to convey the moral degradations and salvations of people at war are also striking. And knowing as we do that the fascists triumph in Spain, it is sometimes exquisitely painful to read this novel that was written before the outcome was determined. 

I can't say I would recommend this book to a student, but occasionally students pick Hemingway for their senior literary research paper and I'm glad I'll have read this as a point of reference going forward.