The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
Thursday, 2. February 2012The Old Man and the Sea is a novel by Ernest Hemingway.
Plot:
Santiago is an old fisherman in Cuba. He just had a streak of bad luck and hasn’t caught anything for almost three months. His young protegé and friend Manolin does everything he can to help but the old man doesn’t like to depend on him. So off he goes again and that morning, a huge fish takes his bait. But it might be that Santiago has gotten more than he bargained for – and that he can handle.
I was prepared to find this book extremely boring. It’s what you always hear of it, isn’t it? “Nothing much happens. It’s just an old man and a freaking fish.” But, I figured, it’s short and you should have read it, I’ll give it a go anyway. And I was really positively surprised when it turned out that this book is really good and not boring in the slightest.
Usually, the first thing that’s important for me in a story are the characters. I have to connect with them, I have to care about their fate in one way or another (whether I want them to die a gajillion horrible deaths or whether I want them to succed). But in this novel, I didn’t much care about Santiago. [Manolin was slightly more interesting, but only slightly.]
Nevertheless I really wanted to know what was going to happen. I wanted to find out whether he would catch that bastard of a fish and bring it home or if he would drown at sea. Not because of Santiago, but because of the story.
It also helped that I loved Hemingway’s style. It’s concise and rhythmic and it flows. Beautiful. I should definitely read more Hemingway.
Summarising: It’s short and a classic for a reason – read it.
I was just talking about this the other day, suggesting that the old man should have let the marlin go…
It was a great read though, I was just poking my fun at it.
He certainly would have saved himself a lot of trouble… ;)
I actually don’t particularly like whatever else I’ve read of Hemingway, which conform to my expectation that they will be boring (part of For Whom The Bell Tolls, a lot of short stories). But I had to study this one in school and although everyone thought it was immensely boring when we first started, I really did like it by the end,
Maybe The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway’s one-off not-boring novel. :) Who would have thought?
I think that my class also read it while I was on my school exchange and I never got around to it until now.