Amazon.com Review
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees.
It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an
award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that
"no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything
worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see
why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or
hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite
motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and
infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of
the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent skin
cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his
cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands
had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords."
Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception
that won him his initial fame:
Just before it was
dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and
swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with
something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a
dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the
last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.
If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely
would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a
triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa
1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning
with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very
last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man
was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and
experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career. --James Marcus
Review
"'The best story Hemingway has written...No page of this beautiful
master-work could have been done better or differently' Sunday Times"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Number of Words in Auth: 2
Formats : EPUB
Number of Formats : 1
Has Cover : Yes
All Identifiers : amazon:3190001502, goodreads:1058106, isbn:9783190001507
Single Author : Ernest Hemingway
Original Source : New_Files_08_11
Sorted Author by LN, FN: Hemingway, Ernest
Title Length : 023
Title Parm D : The Old Man And The Sea
Title Parm G : The Old Man And The Sea
Num of Aut : 1
Title Parm B : (
Record ID : 4777
Uncomma Author : Ernest Hemingway
Title Parm A : The Old Man And The Sea