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A review by ollie_reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
a slight stylistic departure from his early major works, and the first fifty pages or so are engrossing and beautiful, but it gradually becomes more and more tedious and emotionally limp and utterly muted. events that should be exciting and terrifying and riveting feel like they're happening in a tiny snowglobe in your hand with figures so small and so quiet that you feel your eyes and ears straining to make any kind of connection whatsoever.
it's not hemingway in general that I'm allergic to because I found 'the sun also rises' and 'a farewell to arms' very good; it's more that those books exemplified his iceberg theory working exactly as it should while 'for whom the bell tolls' appears at first to be an iceberg but is actually a floe.
the flaw that seems constant in all of his fiction is also at its absolute worst here - the dull and rigid obsession with writing a very calm, sensible, stoic, rational thinking-man protagonist basically incapable of ever having flaws or embarassing himself in any way surrounded by hot-headed tempermental passionate types who are constantly engaging in petty squabbles and furious fights and generally looking silly while our hero sagely observes far too sophisticated to get dragged down into the dirt with them. in his previous novels it's bearable but here it's absolutely ridiculous, a mary sue of staggering proportions.
and I didn't even mention the sex/romance but plenty before me have covered that embarrassment quite well.
it's not hemingway in general that I'm allergic to because I found 'the sun also rises' and 'a farewell to arms' very good; it's more that those books exemplified his iceberg theory working exactly as it should while 'for whom the bell tolls' appears at first to be an iceberg but is actually a floe.
the flaw that seems constant in all of his fiction is also at its absolute worst here - the dull and rigid obsession with writing a very calm, sensible, stoic, rational thinking-man protagonist basically incapable of ever having flaws or embarassing himself in any way surrounded by hot-headed tempermental passionate types who are constantly engaging in petty squabbles and furious fights and generally looking silly while our hero sagely observes far too sophisticated to get dragged down into the dirt with them. in his previous novels it's bearable but here it's absolutely ridiculous, a mary sue of staggering proportions.
and I didn't even mention the sex/romance but plenty before me have covered that embarrassment quite well.