It is fourteen years since "The Sun Also Rises" and eleven since "A Farewell to Arms." More than three hundred years ago John Donne said, "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe every man Pastoral, if here and there a trifle sweet. Others are intense and terrifying, still others gentle and almost The characters are modeled in high relief.Ī few of the scenes are perfect, notably the last sequence and an earlier one when Jordan awakes to the sound of a horse thumping along through the snow. Hemingway has always been the writer, but he has never been the master that he is in "For Whom the Bell Tolls." The dialogue, handled as though in translation from the Spanish, is incomparable. He must make it if the Loyalist drive out of Madrid toward Segovia is to have a chance to succeed. Of course we are very careful and we make no disturbance in these hills."īut Robert Jordan has come to make a disturbance. By a miracle of laziness and stupidity of the Fascists which they will remedy in time.
"Listen to me," El Sordo explains, "we exist here by a miracle. Lives with his band on another ridge some miles way. He meets the saturnine Pablo, who sits in the cave half drunk and mumbles, "Thou wilt blow no bridge here." He meets old Anselmo, who helps him blow it in the end, and Primitivo, Fernando, Augustin and several more. He meets two women there, one middle-aged and as tough and blasphemous as any man, the other youngĪnd frightened, her hair still short because the Falangists shaved it off after they shot her parents and rampaged through her native town. He doesn't hide out alone as prearranged, he has made contact with a certain guerrilla band operating from a cave high in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Or four days covered by the story, he hides out in Franco-controlled territory, into which he has been sent by headquarters to dynamite a strategic mountain bridge. He is neither a professing Communist nor a professional soldier, but a college instructor who happened to be in Spain on sabbatical leave. Robert Jordan is a partizan attached to the Loyalist forces. The tragedy is present and only too plain the bell that began tolling in Madrid four years Hemingway fiction, is practically indistinguishable from the vulgarity, which in this case is a rich and indigenous peasant brand. For Robert Jordan, the young American from Montana, the lust and adventure are quickly drowned in blood. It is the most moving document to date on the Spanish Civil War, and the first major novel of the Second World War.Īs a story, it is superb, packed with the matter of picaresque romance: blood, lust, adventure, vulgarity, comedy, tragedy. Ll that need be said here about the new Hemingway novel can be said in relatively few words.
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