For Whom the Bell Tolls Author: Ernest Hemingway | Language: English | ISBN:
B000FC0OOU | Format: EPUB
For Whom the Bell Tolls Description
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight,"
For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in
The Sun Also Rises and
A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.
- File Size: 999 KB
- Print Length: 480 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0099908603
- Publisher: Scribner (July 25, 2002)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000FC0OOU
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,278 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Classics > American - #29
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Classics > Literary - #53
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
- #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Classics > American - #29
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Classics > Literary - #53
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
"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.
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