This is good Hemingway. It has some of the tenderness of A Farewell
to Arms and some of its amazing power to make one feel inside the
picture of a nation at war, of the people experiencing war shorn of
its glamor, of the emotions that the effects of war - rather than
war itself - arouse. But in style and tempo and impact, there is
greater resemblance to The Sun Also Rises. Implicit in the
characters and the story is the whole tragic lesson of Spain's
Civil War, proving ground for today's holocaust, and carrying in
its small compass, the contradictions, the human frailties, the
heroism and idealism and shortcomings. In retrospect the thread of
the story itself is slight. Three days, during which time a young
American, a professor who has taken his Sabbatical year from the
University of Montana to play his part in the struggle for Loyalist
Spain and democracy. He is sent to a guerilla camp of partisans
within the Fascist lines to blow up a strategic bridge. His is a
complex problem in humanity, a group of undisciplined, unorganized
natives, emotionally geared to go their own way, while he has a job
that demands unreasoning, unwavering obedience. He falls in love
with a lovely refugee girl, escaping the terrors of a fascist
imprisonment, and their romance is sharply etched against a
gruesome background. It is a searing book; Hemingway has done more
to dramatize the Spanish War than any amount of abstract
declamation. Yet he has done it through revealing the pettinesses,
the indignities, the jealousies, the cruelties on both sides, never
glorifying simply presenting starkly the belief in the principles
for which these people fought a hopeless war, to give the rest of
the world an interval to prepare. There is something of the
implacable logic of Verdun in the telling. It's not a book for the
thin-skinned; it has more than its fill of obscenities and the
style is clipped and almost too elliptical for clarity at times.
But it is a book that repays one for bleak moments of
unpleasantness. (Kirkus Reviews)
High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco’s rebels... For Whom the Bell Tolls is Ernest Hemingway’s finest novel, a passionate evocation of the pride and the tragedy of the Civil War that tore Spain apart.
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Review This Product
A Great Addition To Any Home Library
Fri, 18 Jan 2013 | Review
by: Annemi L.
This compact paperback of an Ernest Hemingway classic is beautifully designed with a matte finish that is more resistant to everyday marks and fingerprints.
The cover and binding are of average to above average quality.
The paper it is printed on seems a bit thin but that is to be expected for a paperback.
Overall a great buy and a neccesity in every home library.
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