For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway, 1940
Historical fiction Literary fictionContemporary fiction
An American dynamiter has days to blow a mountain bridge and has just fallen in love, in a war where every stranger's death is your own.
Feels like tenderness and dread. About war, love and memory.
A page from the book
The inventory a man takes once dying has stopped frightening him.
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond. Ernest Hemingway.Hemingway reported the Spanish Civil War from Madrid, then wrote this novel in Cuba, in the house outside Havana where he lived for two decades.
Books that feel like this
More by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway, 1952
An old Cuban fisherman, eighty-four days without a fish, rows out alone and hooks something enormous.
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway, 1964
Hemingway's posthumous memoir of 1920s Paris: cheap oysters, cold wine, Cézanne in the Luxembourg, and the making of a writer.
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- What is For Whom the Bell Tolls like?
- Feels like tenderness and dread. About war, love and memory.
- What should I read after For Whom the Bell Tolls?
- If you liked For Whom the Bell Tolls, try The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien), Yol (Cormac McCarthy) and The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller).
A taste of the feed
What it means for a story to be true when it never happened.
A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man” and other guys start to smile but he’s dead. That’s a true story that never happened.
The Things They Carried · Tim O'Brien
What it feels like to describe something you know is already gone.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Yol · Cormac McCarthy
To know someone so well that sight becomes optional.
I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.
The Song of Achilles · Madeline Miller
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed