For Whom the Bell Tolls

Since I was a kid, I used to read a lot of fairy tales and as I got older, naturally made the transition to fantasy novels. I used to read The Lord of the Rings every year during my university days. I thoroughly enjoyed the Valdemar series, Wheel of Time series (unfinished, only reached #10), Song of Ice and Fire series, Harry Potter series and so on. I generally avoided fiction as well as self-help books. I started to read outside my comfort zone around a decade ago. The fiction novels that impressed me were Cloud Atlas, 1Q84 and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

In recent years, I started to read the literary classics including To Kill a Mockingbird, The Outsider, Fahrenheit 451 and The Jungle Book (finally!). I still like fantasy novels but I couldn't find any along the lines of Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings recently. I like my fantasy novels to have adventure, magic, comedy, magical creatures, heroism, epicness and without any overtly sexual content. I don't like it if the story is too dark either. So yeah, my criteria for a fantasy novel is pretty high.

I just finished reading Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was inspired to read it after Hemingway made a charismatic appearance in Episode 14 of the first season of Timeless, one of my favourite series ever. I might write another post on Timeless. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a war novel; the events in the book take place during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The main protagonist is an American working with the Republican side and tasked with bombing a bridge. The story focuses on the coming and goings of Robert and a small group of guerilla in the countryside leading up to the day of the bombing.

Hemingway didn't fight in the Spanish Civil War but he was there when it took place and he did volunteer as an ambulance driver for the Italian front in 1918 so he as war-time experience. Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, it really felt like you were in hostile territory, living day-to-day and having a sense of dread in the background all the time. You get to see the complexity in planning any war maneuvers and how difficult to change a plan once it has been set in motion. This reminded me what one of my professors mentioned about World War I. One of the reasons it couldn't be avoided was because the army mobilisation had already taken place and it was hard for the nations that did it, to undo it.

I do have to admit that it wasn't easy to finish reading this novel due to its depressing setting. I finished it after a few months of taking a break after reaching the halfway mark. Once I had immersed myself in that world for the second time, it was hard to stop reading it. There were some profound insights about both sides and the difficulty of taking another human's life. These matters are intrinsic to war and no one involved can avoid it. The ending was open-ended but you can sort of deduce how it ended.