For Whom the Bell Tolls Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Ernest Hemingway (Author), Campbell Scott (Narrator), Simon & Schuster Audio (Publisher)

In 1937, Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight", For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise.

"If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

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Product details

Listening Length	16 hours and 17 minutes
Author	Ernest Hemingway
Narrator	Campbell Scott
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	May 01, 2006
Publisher	Simon & Schuster Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B000FIHM3A
Best Sellers Rank	#1,232 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #18 in War & Military Fiction #52 in Classic Literature (Audible Books & Originals) #52 in War Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews

5 star		70%
4 star		16%
3 star		8%
2 star		3%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from the United States

nayman

Do not buy kindle version.

Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2017

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I am talking about kindle version. this book is full of typos. I told amazon to revise this book but it is still same.

Do not buy this book, it is worthless. Prabhat prakashan and amazon are kidding us.

137 people found this helpful

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Mary Ann Van Buskirk

Knock-off Hemingway novel.

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2017

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The kindle edition I read was a "knock-off" Hemingway. The text was weird and not lined up. When there was an obvious expletive in the dialogue, it actually was deleted and the word "obscenity" was placed.

68 people found this helpful

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Ranger Book Reviews

Hemingway's classic, depressing and highly romanticized novel of the Spanish Civil War

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2020

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"For Whom the Bell Tolls" is Ernest Hemingway's famous "Spanish Civil War" novel. It was written during an exciting, idealistic period of Hemingway's life when he was traveling back and forth to Spain to cover the Civil War, traveling around the United States to raise money for the Republican (Leftist/Marxist) cause in Spain, all the while carrying on an affair behind his wife's back with the iconic feminist journalist Martha Gellhorn. To Hemingway's credit, his idealism with the Republican cause was severely punctured by the Marxist incompetence, ideological brutality, and Soviet meddling that doomed the Republican cause from the start. In other words, when faced with the harsh realities on the ground, this die-hard liberal with a soft-heart for socialists realized that the "good guys" were, in fact, not all that good and possibly their own worst enemies.
This cynical realism gave "For Whom the Bell Tolls" a good deal of its moral excellence as a novel.
Robert Jordan is a thinly disguised version of Hemingway, a Midwest college professor and engineer with Republican sympathies. He comes to Spain to lend his skills in demolition and is tasked to blow a bridge in a mountainous region inhabited by pro-Republican guerrillas. The timing of the demo job is crucial to the success of a planned Republican offensive. And Jordan, the idealist, is determined to fulfill his obligations. He is brought to a remote location where he finds among the guerrillas a young woman named Maria with whom he starts a doomed romance (the doomed romance is a common and depressing feature of most Hemingway novels). We all know how this is going to end and you can accuse me of a spoiler alert for that, but all Hemingway novels share this bleak construct. There is an internal conflict within the plot due to the suspicious behavior of the guerrilla leader, Pablo, who everyone, including Pablo's wife, Pilar, suspects of being a traitor. Pilar eventually becomes the group's moral and actual leader, a plot device that was a nod to Marth Gellhorn but which seems woefully unrealistic as it plays out. Anyway... I won't add more without giving it all away...
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" is a great novel, don't get me wrong. It sits alongside "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms" as the trilogy of Hemingway's classic "Lost Generation" novels. I believe all three of these novels are superior to everything else Hemingway wrote fiction-wise (including that high school staple, "The Old Man and the Sea"). They sum up all Hemingway had to say about his materialistic, death-obsessed, hedonistic, liberal-world-view. Truth is that Hemingway's trilogy of classics is the same doomed-romance story told three different ways.
Hemingway does give a good feel for life on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War... even if, in the end, it was still a largely idealized view. In fact, the guerrillas that Hemingway surrounds Robert Jordan with were often the most brutal and conflicted pawns in the Soviet side of the chess board that was the Spanish Civil War. They were known to piously genuflect and perform the sign of the cross before raiding churches to steal their gold and burn their altars. But the Nationalist side never stood a propagandist's chance in hell with telling their side of the story as long as they were receiving military aid from NAZI Germany and facing the likes of Ernest Hemingway across the public relations divide.
Highly recommended for one man's view of the Spanish Civil War, for Hemingway fans who want to focus on his good stuff, and for those in search of the great American novel. But for that third point you may need to keep looking...

17 people found this helpful

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Alex Gruenberg, author of Naked Truths

Great presentation of a complex character

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2015

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Just a quick note: I recently reread this when I was reminded of the complexities of the Spanish Civil War by a magazine article. The book did what I dimly remembered it did: it showed the local, human dimension of the war rather than the history book battle of ideologies we usually see. What I hadn’t remmbered was the subtlety and complexity of the love story. I’ve always thought Hemingway’s ability to present love has been underrated by many people who prefer to focus on the unwillingness of many of his characters to talk about their feelings. It’s true, his characters generally don’t have much to say on the subject, and even their inner monologues tend to be sparse, but Hemingway still manages to express his characters’ deep, vital and nuanced feelings. I think the lack of verbiage is part a reflection of the view expressed by many of his characters that it doesn’t do to talk about significant things too much and part the simple fact that the characters themselves don’t understand what they’re feeling.
Hemingway was a fabulous writer, and much of his work, though clearly rooted in his time period, still stands up to scrutiny today.

52 people found this helpful

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Jim C.

Disappointing Read -- Expected Much More

Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2017

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The Kindle version of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is not very good. I don’t know if that is because it is an abridged version like other reviewers claim or whether it’s just not a good story. If the Kindle version is indeed abridged, I would have expected Amazon.com to alert buyers that it was so. Basically, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is the story of a critical mission by a band of rebels accompanied by an American sympathizer fighting for the Republic against the Fascists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The rebels’ mission was to blow up a bridge, but the interplay among the characters leading up to the attack dominate the story.

25 people found this helpful

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Josephine May

A good read! For those who don't already know Hemingway

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2017

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Having begun to "read into" Hemingway a bit, one begins to realise that everything about his style, including the lack of correct grammar, (as well as being the first writer to use the contracted form in literature, as everybody knows), has to do with conveying the feeling and the atmosphere of the places he is writing about, The more you read him, the more you read him, kind of thing. Hemingway's ability to create emotion and atmosphere that "takes you there", where the action is, is surprising, to say the least. Another: "can't put it down".book.
A good read! For those who don't already know Hemingway.

25 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

Pedestrian at best

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 3, 2018

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I am an avid reader who will generally slog through any book regardless, almost as a badge of honour and this was on my literary bucket list, so I was pretty keen to read it. Unfortunately, I have to report that "For Whom The Bell Tolls" defeated me and I abandoned it after about 120 pages of turgid prose describing not very much at all. If you are the type that likes an author describing every nuance and minute detail of a scene, then this may be for you, but for me it has the singular accolade of being one of the very few books I have ever given up on!

24 people found this helpful

Edward B. Crutchley

A masterpiece

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 6, 2019

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One cannot help but be impressed by the way that Hemingway draws out his story, frustrating as it might at times become. The down-to-earth prose is rich, the protagonists vividly described, the descriptions of the massacre of the fascists and of bullfighting unforgettable. Hemingway’s frequent use of long sentences is remarkably effective. He oddly fixates on rope-soled shoes, and of course alcohol is present on every page. In order to avoid any trouble with censors the text is littered with words like ‘obscenity’ as a substitute for swearwords that would be common to such environments. Spanish phrases are magically blended with their English meanings. One really feels having read a masterpiece...

8 people found this helpful

Sean Slippers

A cure for insomnia

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2021

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Aside from The Old Man and the Sea I haven't read any Hemmingway and thought I'd rectify that by reading this, which most posts tend to think is his greatest work. I enjoyed the beginning but then he starts rambling. I read that he likes writing short sentences, shame he likes writing so many of them. The Hemmingway cultists will hate me, but I gave up - it was just too boring and, to be frank, I lost interest in finding out more about any of the characters or what happened to them. Did he blow the bridge? I don't care. Did they escape? I don't care. No more Hemmingway for me, especially if that is as good as it gets.

4 people found this helpful

Mark Pender

A “modern classic”

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2020

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How strange to be asked by Amazon to review this book! I’m no literary critic and this novel is regarded as a “modern classic” and a “must read” for literary students. Well, here goes.

You either like Hemingway or you don’t. The plot is great and well thought out. His style is simple. His dialogue can be awkward and several pages of it could easily be skipped with no detriment to the read quality. This novel has the great benefit of being written by someone who actually participated in the Spanish Civil War so the authenticity is superb. Give it a go.

5 people found this helpful

P Briggs

Thought provoking novel, quite a few typos

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2020

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This is a novel which examines John Donne’s belief that humanity itself is diminished by the death of any and every individual, hence the allusion in the title: ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’.

It is set in the Spanish Civil War and is a page turner as we follow the struggles and fates of a colourful set of varied individuals. Although we follow those on the Republican side of the conflict, we are encouraged to empathise with some of the Nationalists and none of the Republicans are faultless figures. All the characters are real and credible. The narrative shows the ripples set in motion by the actions of each and every individual, all impinging on how events turn out.

The reason why I’ve taken off 1 star from this novel is nothing to do with the novel itself but the printing: it has clearly been photographed from a marked or creased original and this has led to quite a few typos, e.g. ‘a!!’ for ‘all’, etc.

2 people found this helpful

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For Whom the Bell Tolls Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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