The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
128 pages
Published 1952
Read from March 20 to March 21
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Hemingway is usually held up to this day as the standard for new writers to emulate. Clipped prose, barely an adjective to be seen, clean and laconic and precise -- it's an easy mode to imitate before you find your own voice. I've gotten one or two compliments on the Hemingway-esque qualities of my writing (though not in these book reviews, obviously -- I don't give a damn how many adjectives or cliched phrases find their way into these, so long as I finish them in a reasonable amount of time). Which makes it funny that I haven't read any Hemingway before.
This was an engaging story that everyone who didn't grow up in a car was probably made to read at some point. I found the prose, and especially the dialogue, a bit too clipped for my taste, at least until I understood that the dialogue was not so much naturalistic as formalized. I don't have the points of reference to draw actual comparisons yet, but the back and forth between the boy and the old man had a rehearsed quality that seemed Classical, ritualized, as if spoken in a mystery play, and I grew to like it. Perhaps it was merely meant to sound Latin; I suspect the dialogue was written in Spanish, then translated. I was also interested in the subtle way Hemingway projects his ideas of masculinity, noting here and there that Santiago has no real choice but to prove himself and to kill, leaving aside so much as a single doubt of a man's purpose in life. Hemingway draws attention to it by being so deadpan about it, by not so much as questioning it.
As usual, the philosophical implications, the existentialism and whatnot, interested me less than my surface appreciation of the story.
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