Go home, Hemingway. You're drunk.

I'm in a mad dash to finish For Whom the Bell Tolls before January expires, as a commitment to my resolution to read one book a month. I don't see anything amazing happening prior to my completion of the book, though, so here comes my January Book Report.

Lemme give ya a little prefacement here: I generally adore Hemingway. His books rank amongst my favorites. I voluntarily devoured The Old Man and the Sea when I was but a youngster in high school. I loved the drifting nature of the book... like the sea. I followed that a few years ago with The Sun Also Rises, a monument to love, lust, alcohol, merriment, gender roles, and bull fighting. Hemingway gives us what I amorously describe as his word soup, paragraph long sentences, full of texture. For a lover of words, it's rapturous. Last year I read A Farewell to Arms, and was once again captivated. Upon finishing the piece, I was left with a literary hangover so severe I couldn't read for a month.

I expected the same from For Whom the Bell Tolls. While the book delivers intermittently, some passages feel like a drudge-fest. The lack of the happy-go-lucky party boy Hemingway is largely apparent. Hemingway steps forward with his literary hallmarks about a third of the way through, just as the reader is drawn down into the depths of despair, as an entire village dehumanizes one group of its inhabitants, just before they kill them. It's heavy stuff. There are startling, sparkling glimmers of light, as the main character (Robert Jordan, who is addressed as such at every excruciating mention of his name...) falls intensely-but-rationally in love, or in short meetings. But generally, reading this book is close akin to trying to ride a road bike in squishy mud.

However, I realized last night that my synopsis doesn't do the devices of Hemingway service. The book is an examination of death, and the unpleasantries of war. It shouldn't be comfortable. It should not feel like his other works. It is imperative that he alternate between a sense of urgency (Jordan's love affair) and a feeling of slow-moving dread (mood of impending doom, constant bombardment with death, fear and loathing of Pablo, constant wait for nothing but the worst) in order to convey the concepts he wishes the reader to digest.

Perhaps my discomfort originates in the similarity of the cadence of the book to the pace of real life. We sit around, waiting for life to start, when death is just ahead, and life is all around us, burgeoning with explosive beauty in the aches.

It isn't sexy, not like The Sun Also Rises. It isn't rosy-come-downhill-plunge-into-depression in the style of A Farewell to Arms. The intent doesn't eliminate my frustration with incoherencies I find (see: The winter fool), but it does sooth my expectations. If you're a fan, read For Whom the Bell Tolls. If you've never read Hemingway, don't make it your first.