The Old Man and the Sea

This is my first read of “The Old Man and the Sea.” I completely missed this book in my high school years, and I picked it up shortly after my 50th birthday after years of being told that I should read it.

A reader's age often determines what the reader gets out of Hemingway. I read “Farewell to Arms” in my forties and didn't think much of it. In that book, the main character's interaction with his girlfriend was off-putting to me as I could never imagine treating my own wife in the infantilizing way the character had treated his girlfriend.

On the other hand, at my age, I approached “The Old Man and The Sea” from the sympathetic perspective of Santiago, the Old Man. As everyone must know, this is a “fish story.” Santiago has been unlucky; he has not caught a fish for over 89 days. If it was not for the charity of the boy he befriended, he would have starved. Other fishermen are mocking or pitying him.

But the Old Man has skills sharpened by decades on the sea. He decided to go far out and he hooks a huge marlin. He fights the fish for day, constantly improvising solutions to his problems, and he wins and can almost taste the sweet life, until the sharks take everything from him. But he doesn't whine, he doesn't grumble; after recovering, he goes out the next day to do his job.

If you are late middle-aged, you can see your life in this story. You do your job. You don't complain. You get some experience. People are waiting for you to pack it in. But you keep doing your job.

And maybe you pass along your hard-won knowledge to a protege, like the Boy.

Hemingway's writing style is simple but hypnotizing as he describes the ocean and the intricacies of fishing. Hemingway's narrative approach often remains at the surface as he describes what the character say or does, but does not provide much of the interior life, much less the hopes or dreams, of the character. For example, we are told that the Old Man loves green turtles, but this is something we are told rather than something we see. Yet, I liked Hemingway's prose style for all that. This passage was nice, notwithstanding its stream of consciousness style, because it felt like the kind of associations that the Old Man would make:

“The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean ealy morning smell of the ocean. He saw the phosphorescence of the Gulf weed in the water as he rowed over the part of ocean that the fishermen called the freat well because there was a sudden deep of seven hundred fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated because of the swirl the current made against the steep walls of the floor of the ocean. Here there were concentrations of shrimp and bait fish and sometimes schools of squid in the deepest holes and these rose close to the surface at night where all the wandering fish fed on them.”

There is a lot of information in that passage, and it isn't clear that it is the Old Man who knows this information, but it certainly sets the scene of the world that the Old Man lives in.

Hemingway's approach to setting and detail is probably the strength of the story. One reads along and thinks about using a man-of-war bird to find schools of fish, or the lights of Havana to navigate by, or splashing saltwater on the forward plank to get salt to make the dolphin sushi tastier. The details give the book a similitude of authenticity, which probably makes this book one of the great fishing stories.