Week 2: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

– No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne

Frequently I found myself turning back to the above epigraph, and each time I did so the poignancy of Hemingway's novel intensified. 

I did not know that Hemingway's father committed suicide; this knowledge adds another shade to the novel's powerful appraisal of the value of human life. If Hemingway's own thoughts on the act of death are manifested in this novel, they do not do so from a singular perspective. Rather, Hemingway employs a range of tones to give the novel a wonderfully rich colour: 

Firstly, mandatory, martial, imperative 

 "'Do you think you have a right to kill any one? No. But I have to.'"

leading to a transaction of sorts, a simple cost-analysis,

"'And thy people?' Agustín said to Pablo out of his dry mouth.

'All dead,' Pablo said. He was almost unable to breath. Agustín turned his head and looked at him.

'We have plenty of horses now, Inglés,' Pablo panted."

and then comes denial. Killing becomes unconsecrated, secular, disavowed

"'To me it is a sin to kill a man' [...] But you mustn't believe in killing, he told himself. You must do it as a necessity but you must not believe in it. You must do it as a necessity but you must not believe in it. If you believe in it the whole thing is wrong."

but not without contrition,

"It was a thing of great ugliness, but I had thought if this is how it must be, this is how it must be, and at least there was no cruelty, only the depriving of life which, as we all have learned in these years, is a thing of ugliness but also a necessity if we are to win, and to preserve the Republic."

which cannot be resolved and so ends in abnegation. 

"He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing."

I could write an essay on the last sentence of the book alone. It's poetry:

"He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."

"He could feel his heart beating..." - an affirmation of life, the most elementary awareness of consciousness

"...against..." - a struggle, in opposition

"...the pine needle floor..." - fallen, abandoned to nature, not celestial but terrestrial 

"...of the forest." - a place of free spirits, where myths are born and magic is made.

Someone said they thought they read this book for A-Level - how's about this for an essay title?

In Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan's will to live and love is constantly opposed by his reduction of men to bodies. Only through this action can life be transformed into liberty. - discuss in reference to the last line of the novel.

I'd love to have a crack at that one, one day. 5/5 

Halfway through the week...

...and halfway through my next book, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. So far I'm enjoying it, but when are they are going to blow up that bridge?

Week 1: The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher

I realised too late how gripping a book about normality could be. It’s a long read at 700+ pages, and under the constraints of a week I rather skimmed through the start, waiting for the sort of major event that drives a plot forward dramatically. But the beauty of this text is the way that its ‘happenings’ - which we take to be some sort of theatrical performance or other - were so readily and recognisably drawn from the banalities of everyday life. It’s well crafted to make the ordinary beautiful and to give a cadence to life’s plain punctuation: taking the kids to school, family dinner round the table, kids becoming adults, first loves, first jobs, independence, marriage and towards the end, an increasing present sense of mortality. With this rise and fall played out panorama-style across kindred families of a Sheffield street, the book brilliant charts another life - that of the Thatcher government, which here draws out allegiences in unlikely places, and cuts divisions between the characters that you look forward to, as you can frankly see coming a mile off. With this hindsight, I didn’t give the first hundred pages justice. It was here that the wonderful nuances of character and subtleties of expression were probably first to be noticed. Perhaps, with the text written with such familiarity, so naturally, it was easy to skim through, in the same way that you can easily slip in and out of a conversation in real life. Here you somehow didn’t need to cling on to every word, yet by the end of the book I found myself wanting to. 4/5