This was my first Hemingway and I really enjoyed it. I liked the spare writing style, the way he builds scenes and atmosphere through repetition, rather like post-impressionist layers of paint that build up the sense of the subject. Not only was it a very atmospheric book, it was also a gripping book, a book that demands you engage with the horror and futility of civil war. It has echoes of Tolstoy in the way it deals with the tactics of war (and the great ambiguity of any military action, both in terms of execution and outcome), and it allows the characters to develop along a crooked path. Is Pablo good or bad? He is both and neither. He is a product of the circumstances (the war), but also one of the people shaping those conditions. He is both the ally and the enemy.

The only jarring thing for me was the way he dealt with expletives ("I obscenity in your milk"), which made them very stilted and difficult to read. I would rather he had just left them in Spanish, or used the nearest English translation, however rude. Apparently it was a product of its time (no one would have published it if he had literally translated a phrase like "Me cago en la leche de la puta que te date la luz"), but it seems strange that he pulls no punches on the description of the horrors of war, yet spares us some cursing. Towards the end of the book he allows the hero (Jordan) to rant “Oh, muck my grandfather and muck this whole treacherous muck-faced mucking country and every mucking Spaniard in it on either side and to hell forever. Muck them to hell together…” . This is akin to the way 'fuck' is rendered as 'frack' in Battlestar Gallactica, and more memorably as 'feck' in Father Ted.

From Spanish Civl War to Father Ted. Hemingway certainly makes you think.