I have been trying to finish Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (Scribner) since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February. My busy barber on Main Street, whom I visit monthly, probably thought I was just trying to look smart, always with the same book open as I waited my turn. It’s not that I disliked the novel. I was attracted by the premise: the idea of a volunteer, fighting in someone else’s war. In this case we have an American, Robert Jordan, embedded with a band of guerrillas, whose mission is to blow up a bridge in a remote, mountainous part of northern Spain. And I quite enjoyed Hemingway’s ability to sum up an outsider’s adoration of another culture, while also recognizing the ironies and contradictions in their ways. I didn’t particularly mind the usual criticisms: the medieval-esque dialogue I credited to direct translations from a dialect of Spanish; I looked past the lack of character development, paying more attention to Hemingway’s focus on the futility of the guerrillas’ situation, outmatched by the fascists. I even suspended judgement on the way he wrote the two female characters. Sometimes Hemingway’s prose does work; I liked The Old Man and the Sea, and his account of the village massacre in For Whom the Bell Tolls was compelling: it felt like a short story within a larger story. When I learned later that Hemingway may have based that section of the novel on actual events in Ronda during the Spanish Civil War, it added a new layer of meaning to the story. In other places, however, Hemingway can drone on like a bureaucrat glossing over import and duty regulations. Don’t get me wrong, I still intend to keep going. I have half a dozen chapters left, so with a bit of luck I’ll finish the damn thing by Thanksgiving.—Anson Ching