For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is now remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s most enduring work, not least because of its detailed and personal account of the Spanish Civil War. Its laconic treatment of the universal subjects of friendship, sex, and love – essentials that give additional meaning to life in times of war – is the reason for its lasting appeal. The plot is crudely simple, like the characters’ motives. American Robert Jordan decides to do his part for the country he claims to love by working as a dynamiter for a republican guerrilla unit, and one day, owing to an assignment to blow up a bridge, he finds himself among a group of disparate rebels hiding high up in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra. The novel records only three and a half days of Robert’s experience (and yet this is the longest Hemingway novel); at the end of the “adventure,” things go horribly wrong, as foreshadowed, and the reader is forced to leave the hero behind and move on – just like the re...