For Whom The Bell Tolls

It’s not often that Fuldapocalypse reviews a genuine classic, but today it does with Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. There’s pretty good reasons for this. Classics are either deserved legends or overhyped clunkers in my eyes. Guess which one this is.

This story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, is a slow, dull, and most of all pretentious slog. And get used to seeing “Robert Jordan”, because Hemingway spells his full name out in basically every single mention. He also has Spaniards talk like the King James Bible or Silver Age Thor. I was basically going “Ok, that bridge that ROBERT JORDAN is sent to destroy had better have the whole fate of the war hinging on it” not long into the book.

Maybe this would work for someone else. But it didn’t for me.