Book details of 'The Old Man and the Sea (A Scribner Classic)'

Title	The Old Man and the Sea (A Scribner Classic)
Author(s)	Ernest Hemingway
ISBN	0020519109
Language	English
Published	March 1987
Publisher	Collier Books

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'The Old Man and the Sea (A Scribner Classic)':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old 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 easy 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 old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent 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 those superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame: Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
In the early years, we were taught Language instead of English, and we were too young to read Important Books, so the teachers gave us Nancy Drew instead of Narnia because Nancy Drew was more realistic than Narnia. Later, with teachers who were, themselves, tired of Classics and Great Literature, we were taught Humanities instead of English and read concrete poetry and pornographic novels and if we read famous books, we did it ourselves. Shakespeare was good. It was hard just to read it. "Look Homeward Angel" was really stupid. Our university professor was an avant-garde publisher, and we were assigned books with no beginnings. Some were simply loose pages. Some had blank pages and you were meant to spend as much time reading the blank pages as the ones with writing on them, and when the author came to do a reading Rob noticed that he, possibly knowing what would happen if he said nothing for six whole minutes in front of a class of undergraduates, while he turned the blank pages reverently and deliberately, did not spend as much time on them as he did on the pages with text. Once we read a "Great Novel". We discussed this. On the first page, the father is said to be at the "Yew Tree" pub. The professor told us that this meant that the father was already dead because the Yew tree means death. (This was before Taxol.) Rob did not say anything because he would have been offended. He realized that the entire field of literature was a long string of "in jokes". In that moment, he became enlightened. He read books constantly. He hoarded books as a balding man hoards hair tonic. He read everything. The books were good. "Stop reading," said his wife. "You read even when you are talking to someone!" "I'm sorry," he said. "It's true. I read everything I see." Mostly he read trash. It was easy. It was also where you found the hackers and phreaks and computers that took over the world, and other things that he could write about. There are no good books that speak of these things. Except, maybe, "Snow Crash" . Also "A Fire Upon the Deep" is good. He read good books. The big man wrote good books. He read one about The War. This was the First World War. It was not about the war. It was about an officer in charge of ambulances. He shacked up with a nurse. She got pregnant. There was a retreat. He lost his ambulances. They went to Switzerland. He could do this because his rich grandfather sent him money. Other people were dying, instead. The writing style was choppy. This style is very distinctive. The sentences are short. Some of the sentences go on for a long time but aren't run-on sentences because they keep building and because life is not neat and this style was new then and people thought it was gritty and realistic. It was new when it was new. You couldn't care about the officer. His feelings were hidden. Except for the petty ones. The nurse doesn't come through at all, so you don't much care when she dies. I thought it was unfair that the baby died. Babies are good. He thought he should give the big man at least one more chance. He thought he could read the later book. It had won a Nobel Prize. It was also short. So he read the other book. It was written later than the first book. The sentence style was the same. Thoughts jumped around. Some were confused. Some were contradictory. Some details were irrelevant. In the second book you knew more about what the old man thought. You also knew some of what the young man thought. The choppy sentences and the jumps to irrelevant topics and back again in the early book are the same way life works but do not have meaning like the jumps in the later book which may not have a meaning that can be easily told but do have subtlety and irony and the fact that big words cannot be used means the long sentences must say something plainly. The reading is good. The young man in the early book sees only what he sees. The old man in the later book sees more. The big man who wrote the later book must have seen some more as well. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995
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