For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea- two great tastes...

Got a work related call at ten this morning- an hour after I had gotten to bed after my 12 hour shift- that left me with a spiky stress ball in the back. So I guess I'm awake again.

I finished Hemingways "For Whom the Bell Tolls" AND "The Old Man and the Sea" which means I've read through all of the stuff I picked up to read from Hemingway. To close out this chapter of my life I plan on going next Tuesday to see that new Woody Allen movie with Owen Wilson about a writer who travels back to 1920's France and meets the expatriate crowd. I don't think there's anybody who's really in the same headspace with me that I could go see it with them.

Finding someone to go see Bad Teacher, on the other hand, will be easy.

For Whom the Bell Tolls ended up as probably my favourite of the Hemingway novels. Unlike "A Farewell to Arms" (I don't THINK I'm mixing up the books, but the titles are pretty unhelpful), his other war-novel, there's some actual war in this one. That seems like a plus to me, you know, truth in advertising and all that. This one also has a love story that sucks you in, like what was promised on the book jacket for "To Have and Have Not" but was a total lie there.

I had a really difficult time getting a handle on the characters- but that quickly became a strength of the book. The characters were nuanced and human. That said, if they'd described Pablo as having "beady, red rimmed eyes" from the start, it wouldn't have taken so long to know that he's sort of the villain of the piece.

Not that it took too long to figure out, but still. When he first showed up I pictured a young brute that wouldn't play much of a role, then it turned out he was relatively old, murderous, and a central figure to the story.

I loved Anselmo, the old man who took so quickly to Robert Jordan (the protagonist). Anselmo was a good, loyal man. There's a scene where he's on a position scouting what enemy troops pass by, and he's been told to stay put until someone comes to relieve him, but there's an unexpected snowstorm and he nearly freezes before Jordan comes for him. Anselmo kept telling himself that'd he'd leave after one more minute, that he couldn't be expected to stay in the snow, and he KEPT saying that until Robert Jordan showed up saying "you would've stayed here till you froze!"

And he definitely would have.

I'm slightly conflicted about the love story between Robert Jordan and Maria. They basically fall in love with each other at first sight, and Maria is the perfectly sweet, immediately subservient girl <- that's the part that's weird when read with a modern sensibility.

Originally I thought "Man, that Hemingway, what a romantic" with this love at first sight business, but with the characterization of Maria, as well as his four wives (I think Hemingway had four... maybe he didn't actually marry the last one or two...) I can't help but feel that this is ultimately reflective of a disregard for women. Though I understand he never really got over losing touch with his first wife. I figure Maria is Hemingway's stand in for the "perfect woman" and so she doesn't get as full a personality as the rest. She has her moments, but they are few and far between.

I recorded that on P. 289 Hemingway has fun with a famous Gertrude Stein-ism when he writes Robert Jordan as saying "an onion is an onion is an onion." This is interesting as I believe the two were feuding at this point- the book was released in 1940.

Because most of the book is written as if it was in spanish, there are certain weird phrases. Mostly just how the swearing comes across. Here's an awesome example from P. 444:

Anselmo shouted(,) "It is a scientific labour."
"I obscenity in the milk of science," Pilar raged to the gypsy.

I obscenity in the milk of science- that's classic, that's hilarious. I just wish there was an exclamation point after science. For science!

Hemingway has quite the preoccupation with death and downer endings- I think the saying is if you take any story far enough along, it becomes a tragedy- but I was nearing the end of the book, and Robert Jordan blew up the bridge, and was alive, and Maria was still alive too! I began to hope- maybe, MAYBE- there'd be a happy ending in this book! Robert and Maria, off to their dream hotel in Madrid!

So, spoilers, ten pages before the end Robert Jordan gets his leg broken, he's bleeding internally, and is resigned to death, sending Maria off with the words that "where she is, so to will I be" or something to that effect.

It feels lame (pardon the pun- or not) that they couldn't drag him to a doctor, or chop off his leg or soemthing, but maybe that's me expecting too much out of 1930's Spanish guerilla war medicine. Plus, the heavy heavy foreshadowing meant SOMETHING tragic had to happen. Plus, Hemingway is writing, so that's foreshadowing enough. I tell you, the man got cynical really young. Which is what happens when your father commits suicide (as did the character Robert Jordan's father- not for nothing are Hemingway's protagonists called author self insertions)

BUT close as they come to it, they don't actually end the book with Robert Jordan dying. He's alone, he's near death, he's been set up with a machine gun type thing to guard the rear as the enemy approaches, and the enemy has just arrived... THE END.

So really, the novel ends on a sort of mexican stand off, so you'll excuse me if I personally add to the story that Robert Jordan passed out before he could kill any of the enemy, he was discovered, recieved medical attention before interrogation, and then was freed or escaped or something to go find Maria and they live happily ever after.

Because- FINALLY. I mean, come on Ernest, give us something good in one of these books!

Actually, I spoke too soon. For all it's doom and gloom of catching great fish only to get it eaten away by sharks on the interminably long trip home, The Old Man and the Sea is pretty positive. Sure, Santiago (the Old Man) didn't succeed in bringing home the fish bacon, but he has the skeleton proof, and that's astonished and won the respect of the townspeople, AND Manolin (the Sea... no, I'm kidding, he's the boy, Santiago's only real friend) has decided to stand up to his parents and go back to fishing with the old man, which is more than Santiago could've hoped for really.

Yeah, the money would've been nice, but really he thought about the kid enough on the trip that it was clear he wanted him back. Mission complete.

Santiago is so endearing, with his hard work ethic and love of the great DiMaggio of the New York Yankees.

I wonder if "The Old Man and the Sea" was another step off into something of a different genre for Hemingway, it reads like children's literature. I say that because the style is substantially different from his other works, it's even more simple- and that's saying something, "short, declarative sentences" are the Hemingway claim to fame. But still, this feels different. And the only other time there was a significant difference in the feel of the style was in "The Torrents of Spring" when Hemingway was mimicing (fairly successfully too) the style of a Henry Fielding comedic novel- a genre shift.

Well, that's just a thought anyways.

Speaking of just a thought, let me wrap this up and maybe finally get some sleep- now my back is hurting from sitting in the chair here, but I'll gladly take that over what I had before.