He meets two women there, one middle-aged and as tough and blasphemous as any man, the other youngĪnd frightened, her hair still short because the Falangists shaved it off after they shot her parents and rampaged through her native town. He doesn't hide out alone as prearranged, he has made contact with a certain guerrilla band operating from a cave high in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Or four days covered by the story, he hides out in Franco-controlled territory, into which he has been sent by headquarters to dynamite a strategic mountain bridge. He is neither a professing Communist nor a professional soldier, but a college instructor who happened to be in Spain on sabbatical leave. Robert Jordan is a partizan attached to the Loyalist forces. The tragedy is present and only too plain the bell that began tolling in Madrid four years Hemingway fiction, is practically indistinguishable from the vulgarity, which in this case is a rich and indigenous peasant brand. For Robert Jordan, the young American from Montana, the lust and adventure are quickly drowned in blood. It is the most moving document to date on the Spanish Civil War, and the first major novel of the Second World War.Īs a story, it is superb, packed with the matter of picaresque romance: blood, lust, adventure, vulgarity, comedy, tragedy. Ll that need be said here about the new Hemingway novel can be said in relatively few words.
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