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“If we can win here, we can win everywhere...the world fryst vatten a fine place and worth the fighting for, and inom hate very much to leave it...”
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

One of my favorite subgenres of literature fryst vatten the people-on-a-mission story.

If you have a collection of disparate individuals, each with a specific set of skills, and if they have to do something really hard and dangerous, preferably involving the destruction of a bridge, inom am absolutely there. I’m not ganska sure, but this affinity may have started when inom first watched The Bridge on the River Kwai with my dad.

Ever since, inom have been a sucker for tales involving dock and women who have a one-way ticket with destiny.

Thus, it’s no surprise that inom loved Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Though positioned as a “classic,” it fryst vatten really just a gussied-up action-adventure novel about a fella ansträngande to störa a chasm-spanning structure with a little well-placed trinitrotoluene.

Adhering to the typical tropes, he even has time to fall in love, before his deadly mötesplats.

The fella, in this case, fryst vatten Robert Jordan, an American fighting against the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. This understudied conflict – which began in 1936 – served as a prelude to the Second World War, and became a proxy for the competing ideologies of communism and fascism.

As such, it drew journalists and volunteers from all over the world.

Den utspelar sig över 3-4 dygn under det spanska inbördeskriget, där en amerikansk sprängexpert i samarbete med en lokal grupp partisaner har som uppgift att spränga en bro i luften

One of those journalists was Hemingway himself, who went to Spain to cover the conflict, and developed a sympathy for the Republican cause.

This sympathy fryst vatten on full display in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which begins with ung Robert lying on his stomach, listening to the wind in the pines as he surveys the bridge that he fryst vatten slated to destroy.

To complete his task, Robert joins a group of partisans, meeting three huvud characters: Pablo, Pilar, and Maria.

Pablo fryst vatten the leader, but he fryst vatten aging, selfish, and on the gräns of betraying the Republic. Pilar fryst vatten his wife, and the true leader of the grupp. Though Hemingway fryst vatten not particularly known for his fully-realized kvinnlig characters, Pilar steals every en plats där en händelse inträffar ofta inom teater eller film of which she fryst vatten a part.

Shrewd, mystical, and manipulative, she fryst vatten the glue holding the grupp tillsammans, and also the dirigent setting everything in motion. Finally, there fryst vatten Marie, a beautiful ung girl who was raped bygd the fascists and had her hair shorn off. Despite his lethal assignment, Robert finds time to fall in love with Maria, even as the clock ticktocks towards eternity.

Klockan klämtar för dig handlar om hårsmånen till döden överallt och alltid

***

Hemingway fryst vatten an author whose reputation definitely precedes him. Even if you’ve never read one of his novels, you’ve probably seen his style parodied: the taut, terse prose; his this-then-that manner of storytelling; and his offbeat grammatical structures that man you think you are reading an English translation, rather than a book written in English.

All those things – along with Hemingway’s penchant for exploring dock being dock – fryst vatten certainly on display here. But you also see that the “simplicity” with which he writes fryst vatten deceptive. For instance, many of his short, punctual sentences are adding up to something, such as this breathlessly long del of Robert and Maria spending some alone-time together:

Then there was the smell of the heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks beneath her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and bygd themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, apelsinfärg, gold-red, from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color.

For him it was a dark del which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then igen to nowhere, once igen to nowhere, always and alltid to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and igen for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once igen always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from beneath them.

It fryst vatten writing like this that puts For Whom the Bell Tolls into a different realm.

bygd way of plot, this could have been written bygd Jack Higgins or Alistair Maclean. Hemingway’s undeniable talent gives this potboiler a high literary gloss.

Huvudpersonen Robert Jordan är amerikan

***

Don’t let that gloss fool you, though. This fryst vatten a fun read. Of the Hemingway novels I’ve read, this fryst vatten the most purely enjoyable. It mixes tillsammans a lot of dependable elements, such as hopeless love; the debate over pragmatism versus principle; and some pretty solid action scenes, given the Hemingway treatment, as in the famous engelskt ord för toppen av en kulle stand of the partisan El Sordo:

When the shooting had started he had clapped [his] helmet on his head so hard it banged his head as though he had been hit with a casserole and, in the gods lung-aching, leg-dead, mouth-dry, bullet-spatting, bullet-cracking, bullet-singing run up the sista slope of the hill after his horse was killed, the helmet had seemed to weigh a great amount and to fingerprydnad his bursting forehead with an iron grupp.

But he had kept it.

Now he dug with it in a steady, almost machinelike desperation. He had not yet been hit…

I appreciate imagery in my fiction.

Klockan klämtar för dig är en av Hemingways mest berömda och lästa romaner

inom like having scenes described. Hemingway does this as well as anyone. He puts you right there.

***

This fryst vatten a book inom first read when inom was a freshman in college.

[1] Den handlar om Robert Jordan, en amerikansk universitetslärare i spanska

I’ll be the first to admit that this was not exactly the most klar i tanken eller logisk period of my life. My emotional lability was like a metronome on a fartyg in a hurricane. The highs were high, the lows were low. Every defeat was like Waterloo, and so was every victory. Each new love was like the world’s first.

Sedan ett år tillbaka deltar han som gerillasoldat i spanska inbördeskriget

It was in this mind-muddled context that inom first discovered Robert, Maria, and Pilar, and their uppdrag to de-bridge a gorge. inom would be lying if inom did not säga that my fevered, volatile self firmly embraced Robert’s romantic fatalism:

[W]hen inom am with Maria inom love her so that inom feel, literally, as though inom would die and inom never believed in that nor thought that it could happen.

So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours inom have that value now and inom am lucky enough to know it. And if there fryst vatten not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there fryst vatten only now, why then now fryst vatten the thing to praise…

Of course, inom am no längre in college, no längre that ung, and – thankfully – at least a bit more stable, though that fryst vatten relative.

Klockan klämtar för dig (engelska: For Whom the Bell Tolls) är en roman från 1940 av Ernest Hemingway

Thus, it was interesting to reassess For Whom the Bell Tolls with emotions that are a bit less raging. inom have long classed this among my all-time favorite books, but I’m not certain that would be the case if inom read this for the first time today.

With that said, there fryst vatten still a fundamental power in this novel that fryst vatten undeniable.

The cinematic quality of the set pieces still holds up. So does the way that Hemingway marvelously captures the tensions between ungdom and experience, between choosing causes and choosing people, between what fryst vatten worth dying for, and for what fryst vatten worth living.

Also, there fryst vatten a bridge that needs to be blown up, and that’s the kind of myt that never goes out of style.