A Review of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea was the last novel - a novella actually written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in the 1950's and is often considered by many to be his greatest work. The novel was written while he was on a literary and personal siesta on the island of Cuba.

The story as is often seen in literary epochs is a rather simple one: A fisherman Santiago decides to go out into the waters for one last go at breaking his 84 day-long dry spell. He finally catches a fish on the 85^th, a marlin that is the largest catch of his life. However, in the all too mundane world Hemmingway wished us to imagine for poor old Santiago the fish is attacked by sharks amidst a storm as the old fisherman struggles to get it back to the port of Havana.

In the end all that reaches home, is a pile of bones tied next to a ship.

Saying anything more about this book would be the ultimate spoiler of all. Here, Hemingway uses each one of his speculated infinite powers to conjure up an image of a man like all men, beaten up and worked down through the vast corridors of his life, looking for that one last meaningful touch of beauty to make it all seem sublime. And instead of giving him his one last jump for joy, he takes it all away from him. But before you start being turned off this book, let me re-assure you, that he indeed does finally achieve it all. To tell us all, is the boy who watches the story unfold from the wings and in the end turns out to be what could be the best possible version of his character: a real boy.

Hemingway wrote the book at a time when his literary position was quite in question. His time as a war journalist in World War II lent him nothing in way of experience. His last novel "Across the River and Into the Trees" was branded by critics as a self-obsessed, over-indulgent and overly bitter autobiography. The failure of many marriages didn't help him much either. Retracing his steps, one might say that The Old Man and the Sea is Hemmingway's tribute to the land of Cuba that gave him independence and friends when he needed them most. It also gave him his titular character by the way.

But more importantly Hemmingway here, channels the best features of a style all too imbibed in modern writing, with his first person, athletic narrative coloring the cast expanses his mind visualizes in all their hues. He creates characters out of nature, religions out of fish and sinners out of sharks. Hemmingway himself went on to say about his book that:

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.

And indeed he did. Hemingway went on to win the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature following the year of The Old Man and the Sea's publication. It rounded off a career that was as troubled, misunderstood, ridiculed and in the end idolized as the book's main character. 55 years after its release, it still remains a must read book for anyone who wishes to go through the looking glass and come back with nothing except some of the warmest memories one can ever feel.