Book Review: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

I love how last week, I was thinking about how I was craving a book that induced a strong emotion in me, and that very same day, I finished For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and quite literally bawled. Seriously, I cried harder than I have for a hot minute. So produce a strong emotion in me it did.

This one took me a bit to get invested in. When I first started reading it, I was a bit put off by the style. Hemingway intentionally wrote it as if it were translated literally from Spanish. So, he uses “thou” and “thee” as the formal version of Spanish “you” (usted vs tú), and writes “yes, man” as a translation for “sí, señor.” I wasn’t sure I liked such a literal translation, and it took me out of the story at the beginning. But, as per usual with Hemingway, I was drawn into his style and didn’t notice it as the book went on. 

The book also had a few chapters that were a bit dry. I didn’t get the feeling like I couldn’t put the book down until the ending climax, but by the end, I really couldn’t put the book down (even though I knew I had texts to respond to, and my family were about to take a road trip to my apartment to see if I was okay). In the last few chapters, Hemingway made me oscillate between knowing how the book would end and actually believing he would go in a different direction with the ending. He genuinely put me on a rollercoaster, which made the ending that much more effective (hence the bawling). 

Hemingway is such a great writer of war, probably due to his own experience as an ambulance driver in WW1 and as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and WW2, and he’s great at communicating that war is hell (“Qué puta es la guerra” y “Qué cosa más mala es la guerra,”) and essentially a crime.  

But he’s not only talented at writing war so we feel the depth of its injustice, but he also masterfully dives into insights into the human condition, relatably contradictory internal monologues, and compelling character depth. I also enjoyed his creative avoidance of explicit obscenity, i.e. “I obscenity in the milk of my shame.”

I think that A Farewell to Arms wins out over For Whom the Bell Tolls, despite my depth of emotion at the end, because it was more consistent in its strength. I’m going to have to read The Sun Also Rises again to truly rate all of the Hemingway books I’ve read.