For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I started with enthusiasm for the nature writing "As they spoke, the owl flew between the trees with the softness of all silence, dropping past them, then rising, the wings beating quickly, but with no noise of feathers moving as the bird hunted."

Was amused by the famous post-coital passage where the "earth moves." "Oh," she said, "I die each time. Do you not die?"

"No, almost. But did thee feel the earth move?"

"Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please."

And cringed at the effective battle descriptions. "In all that, in the fear that dries your mouth and your throat, in the smashed plaster dust and the sudden panic of a wall falling, collapsing in the flash and roar of a shellburst, clearing the gun, dragging those away who had been serving it, lying face downward and covered with rubble, your head behind the shield working on a stoppage, getting the broken case out, straightening the belt again, you are now lying straight behind the shield, the gun searching the roadside again;"

But the stilted characters, the artificiality the author uses to simulate formal Spanish, interfered with my reading and the book became a dramatic slog as I awaited and awaited the denouement. Would they he ever blow up the damn bridge?

In Jeffrey Meyers bio of Hemingway: A Biography, he excerpts some of the contemporary reviews of the book most of whom felt it reinstated Hemingway's literary reputation after some of his work of the 1930's. Edmund Wilson: "an imagination for social and political phenomena such as he has hardly given evidence of before." Dorothy Parker: "written with a wisdom that washes the mind and cools it. It is written with an understanding that rips the heart with compassion." Lionel Trilling: Hemingway is wholly aware of the moral and political tensions which existed in actual fact" and is writing "to the top of his bent...equal to Tolstoy in his best battle manner" but weaknesses he pointed out: astonishing melodrama in place of tragedy...and devastating meaninglessness of the death of Robert Jordan...men all dominance and knowledge, the women all essential innocence and responsive passion." That struck me, too. Graham Greene criticized the love story 'told with Mr. Hemingway's usual romantic carnality." and V. S. Pritchett agreed that the novel "was marred by the love affair" but the book restored the author to "his seriousness as a writer."

Read this because a friend is doing the Atlantic's List and I had a copy, https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc..., but this title is not on the list. Will I go on to read A Farewell to Arms? Stay tuned.



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