I do believe I’ve found the Hemingway I’ve been waiting for. While I’m now on page 300 and something of For Whom the Bell Tolls, I marked page 252 because, on it, the writing was stellar. It’s the sort of writing that reminded me of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. By the way, if you enjoy what you read below, please take a look at The Road. It’s one of my top five favorite books of all time. It’s intense, to say the least.
In all that, in the fear that dries your mouth and your throat, in the smashed plaster dust and the sudden panic of a wall falling, collapsing in the flash and roar of a shellburst, clearing the gun, dragging those away who had been serving it, lying face downward and covered with rubble, your head behind the shield working on a stoppage, getting the broken case out, straightening the belt again, you now lying straight behind the shield, the gun searching the roadside again; you did the thing there was to do and knew that you were right. You learned the dry-mouthed, fear-purged, purging ecstasy of battle and you fought that summer and that fall for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny, for all the things that you believed and for the new world you had been educated into. You learned that fall, he thought, how to endure and how to ignore suffering in the long time of cold and wetness, of mud and of digging and fortifying. And the feeling of the summer and the fall was buried deep under tiredness, sleepiness, and nervousness and discomfort. But it was still there and all that you went through only served to validate it. It was in those days, he thought, that you had a deep and sound and selfless pride—that would have made you a bloody bore at Gaylord’s, he thought suddenly.
I’m still not thrilled with this book. While, yes, there have been some sections that were slightly better than just okay, so far, the author seems to have been paid by the word. I tend to have this issue with the classics. They were obviously written during another time and their suspense, nuance, and revelations of the ultimate truth by the end is typically somewhat ho-hum. I read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas about a decade ago because of all the “Must Read!” reviews and while the ending was cleverly thought out, it certainly wasn’t worth the agony of reading the entire book. Although, I will say that Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert were fun to read. I wouldn’t read either of them again, but there’s a sort of satisfaction one earns by trudging through something that seems as though it should have been listed as a Harvard Classic. Nothing in this post was actually listed there, but the titles I’ve mentioned seem like they should have been. By the way, if you’ve accomplished the Herculean task of completing those readings, God help you. You’ll never get that time back.
I read two pages of For Whom the Bell Tolls last night before my eyelids became so heavy I had to put the book down. It’s annoying when this type of thing happens because I can recall reading many, many pages of books I love. What I’d really like is if people who leave reviews for these books would do so honestly. This is not a “Must Read!” book. Perhaps by its end I’ll change my mind, but so far, it’s just not. If you’d like a list of must read books, just ask and I’ll give you one. But then again, maybe you’re not like me. Perhaps we don’t have the same tastes. Who knows. All I know is that I really did love the quote I displayed above and I’ve got my fingers crossed that there are more of them in the final 180+/- pages I’ve got left.
