For Whom the Bell Tolls

This classic lives up to my expectations. Previously I had read only short stories by Hemingway but I did know something of his style, the combination of long loose sentences with clauses added one after the other mixed in with short declarative sentences, the use of repeated words, passages of stream of consciousness dropped in to heighten the emotional impact of a scene. This book was written around when he was at the height of his ability and influence, and made quite a big impression when it came out.

The viewpoint narrator, Robert Jordan, is one of those men who takes pride in being competent but undemonstrative. I think that what makes the last speech he gives, to his love Maria, so powerful, because it goes against his inclinations.The trope of Chekhov's gun is subverted when at one point he lays hand on his automatic preparing to shoot Pablo because of the danger that character poses, but ends up never shooting anyone after all. I noticed that in the band of fighters he was with, many were named after saints: Pablo, Anselmo, Agustin, Maria, even Pilar (a reference to the virgin Mary). The names of people outside that core group did not follow this pattern.

There is a lot of violence in the story, both shown and reported indirectly, some of it coming out of cruelty, some from stupidity, some as impersonal acts of war such as bombs dropping, and some from blind bad luck. The author places it in juxtaposition to the beauty, love, and happiness that the Jordan is able to find at the same time. At one point, Jordan notices the beauty of the warplanes on their missions to the front. The unrelieved tension between these two large themes is what I think makes this a novel of the twentieth century.

My main peeve is with the choice to render the Spanish dialogue semi-literally with liberal use of the second person familiar pronouns "thou, thee, thy" obsolete in English. This made for me every ordinary pronouncement sound like it was being uttered by Elizabethan courtiers, and the literal translation of Spanish idioms didn't make it any less weird. I think it's especially jarring in audiobook form because of the increased immediacy you expect, and it kept taking me out of the story instead. There are also minced oaths substituting for actual obscenities to get pat book censors of the time, which I am more willing to accept. Still, the story and the characters were drawn with so much skill I could not let this knock my rating down by a whole star.

The story engaged me, keeping me interested in what was going to happen cliffhanger-style with glimpses of the characters' pasts brought in to help me sympathize with them. The one standout monologue occurs early on when Pilar tells of the roundup and execution of Fascist sympathizers in her hometown. That really underscored what kind of torture and brutality a reader was in for as the big military action was to come closer. There are reminiscences from the bullring also, all part of the author's fascination with that phenomenon and with the idea of death more generally. To read these episodes now for me is to have a sort of cinematic experience, though of course the use of flashback and interpolated stories are techniques a lot older than film.