The Old Man and The Sea

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The Old Man and The Sea

  • ISBN13: 9780684801223
  • Condition: USED – GOOD
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The Ancient Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway’s most enduring works. Told in language of fantastic simplicity and power, it is the tale of an ancient Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme suffering — a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss. Written in 1952, this hugely successful tale confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.Amazon.com Review
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that really does honor to the leader. In fact The Ancient 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 simple 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 ancient and infirm to consume of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the leader’s later work: “The brown blotches of the kindly 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 persons superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame:

Just before it was dark, as they passed a fantastic island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were building like with something under a yellow blanket, his tiny line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, right gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.

If a younger Hemingway had written this tale, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph–just as the leader delighted in doing, circa 1935. As a replacement for his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with small more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: “The ancient man was dreaming about the lions.” Perhaps there’s some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere–but The Ancient Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last fantastic catch of Hemingway’s career. –James Marcus

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