DNF Review: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Challenges: 
Bingo Board 2017: Read For Whom the Bell Tolls
Around the Year in 52 Books: A banned book



Me and Ernest just don’t get along. I feel like I’ve read or tried to read a bunch of his stuff, but it just isn’t for me. I put this book on my bingo board because I’ve been wanting to give him a second chance to woe me, seeing as he is considered a great writer of classic books. But no dice. I still didn’t like his writing…

This book is about the Spanish civil war era and we follow a young idealistic American who has come to fight with the republicans. He is a dynamite expert (I’m sure there’s a fancy name for that?) and he is sent into the mountains to meet a small group of rebels who will help him blow up a bridge in preparation for a battle that is being planned. 

He meets the rebels and honestly that’s as far as I got. I just could not stand the writing style. The dialogue was incredibly stilted and formal going something like this: 

I’m here to blow up the bridge
The bridge?
Yes, the bridge
We should blow up a train instead
No, the bridge
No train
No, the bridge
The bridge?
Yes, the bridge.
The bridge is bad
No, the bridge will be good
It will be good
Yes
A train will be better
No, the bridge…..


On and on like that constantly! And then the language was also really old timey using words as thee and thou and it just seemed really out of place. I don’t know if that was meant to emulate some sort of formal Spanish but it put me off big time. So I think that is it for me and Hemingway. Here we part ways and I will have to live without his circuitous dialogue. I think I will survive. 

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