The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was next up on my list of classic American authors to read. Yesterday I finished his 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea.
Hemingway fans recommended starting with a lot of his short stories to get exposed to his writing. I read six of those in the Finca Vigia Collection, but I was excited to get into something a bit bigger in scope.
The Old Man and the Sea is barely bigger. It will take most readers only a couple hours to complete the journey. I stretched it out over a week and really enjoyed it.
The premise is straightforward: an old fisherman heads out to sea and tries to catch a giant marlin.
There are plenty of themes at work here, but to me the strongest that jumped off the page were those about a man appreciating and perfecting his craft, the perseverance of doing something difficult, and the respect and admiration for nature.
There are only a handful of characters to speak of in this story, but the old man himself was a joy to follow, and I especially loved the tangents about his love for baseball and "the great Joe DiMaggio."
Over the years I've learned to appreciate brevity and the effective telling of a concise story—The Old Man and the Sea is definitely that. This already feels like one of those books that will stick with me long after putting it down.
Overall: 60
- Prose: 70
- Character: 55
- Plot: 55
- Worldbuilding: 70
Here's how I line up the American classics I've read in the last two years:
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy — 80
- Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry — 70
- East of Eden, John Steinbeck — 65
- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway — 60
- Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy — 45
I use the 20-80 scale to rate things. For books I have four different categories, plus an overall grade. The overall grade is typically an average of the four main categories, though I reserve the right to round up or down based on other factors, like how thought-provoking or resonant a book might have been for me.
Highlights
- "The Yankees cannot lose." "But I fear the Indians of Cleveland." "Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio." "I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland." "Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago."
- Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.
- The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
- After he judged that his right hand had been in the water long enough he took it out and looked at it. "It is not bad," he said. "And pain does not matter to a man."
- "But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
- But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left. That and baseball.