"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Monday, August 01, 2005

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway, 1940)

My favorite of the Hemingway novels.

Robert Jordan (an American fighting on the side of the Republic) is assigned to blow up a bridge in the Spanish Civil War (covered in detail in this book). He works with local partisans. Pilar (steady older woman) is married to Pablo (unsteady partisan leader). Jordan falls in love with Maria. Interesting story line about Jordan's family history.

Hemingway was in Spain for much of the civil war and elements of the book supposedly are based on incidents he observed or heard about.

Like A Farewell to Arms, characters are disillusioned about war and war leadership.
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