Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea
The novel that won Hemingway the Nobel Prize. Santiago, an ageing Cuban fisherman, rows out alone and hooks the greatest marlin of his life. What follows is a study in dignity, endurance, and the grace of trying.
Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks in Cuba in 1951. He knew immediately it was the best thing he had ever written. It is 127 pages. It contains everything.
The setup
Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone 84 days without a catch. The village boys have been pulled away by their parents. He rows out alone before dawn, further than anyone else, and hooks a great marlin he cannot see. What follows is three days at sea — the line taut between the old man and the fish, the fish pulling the skiff, Santiago holding on.
The iceberg in action
This is Hemingway's iceberg theory made flesh. Nothing is explained. The dignity is in what is not said: the pain in Santiago's hands, the boy he thinks of, the lions he dreams of on the beaches of Africa. Hemingway strips language down to action and sensation and somehow puts the whole of a human life inside it.
What the book is actually about
It is about failure and what a man does with it. Santiago catches the marlin and then loses it — stripped to the bone by sharks on the way home. He returns with nothing but the skeleton. But he has not been beaten. The book insists on the difference. There is a kind of winning that has nothing to do with what you bring back, and Hemingway knew it was the only kind worth writing about.
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
The Nobel Committee said this book showed the power of his style “as it is at its best”. For once, the Committee was right.
A perfect novel. 127 pages that contain everything Hemingway believed about how to live and how to lose.
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