Book Review: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Hypnotic, moving, and simply a pleasure to read from start to finish, The Old Man and the Sea is a classic that somehow missed me. I’m glad I finally picked it up. At just 120 pages it’s easy to breeze through on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Hemingway’s famously terse style makes the pages just fly by. The story is as threadbare as a novel can be: An old fisherman sets out to sea and struggles to land the greatest catch of his life. The laser-focused narrative is refreshing. There’s no epic political conflict, no complex backstory for the old man, no subplots, no exposition dumps — absolutely nothing inessential is here.
The simplicity allows the story’s themes to ring through clearly. Old Man and the Sea is quite melancholy in its presentation of human struggle, perseverance, the passage of time, and man’s place in nature. The book is in many ways a Rorschach test in that your interpretation of the central conflict and ending will be a function of your own values. I’m tempted to write my own thorough analysis of the moral ideas presented herein, but for the sake of brevity I’ll leave it to another essay.
Whatever you take from it, the story itself is beautifully told with great atmosphere and tension. This one is a true masterpiece and easy to recommend to any literate person.
Grade: A+
