For Whom the Bell Tolls
Last year I read and wrote a short reviews of A Moveable Feast , and The Snows of Kilimanjaro , both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. But this book is something else. I read it after reading Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War . Now being outside of living memory, the events of this terrible period in Spanish history (and European history) struck me afresh in terms of their terror. For readers at least, the suffering and bravery of Spanish people, and the witnesses to this suffering in terms of various writers, artists, journalists and international volunteers is so well documented that you might ask what a novel can bring, especially when read now. In my case, at least, reading Hemingway after gaining some understanding of the period through wider reading really helped me to imagine and to empathise, and it’s clear that Hemingway wanted this, as well as a broader, more objective view than some might credit. I’m reluctant to try to really review a book that is such a known classic, so I