The Old Man and the Sea

I didn’t enjoy this. What is the point? Everyone loses in the end.

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How could this book have won the Nobel Prize? Was the award given as a political decision? Did the committe feel sorry for the guy? It boggles the mind, especially because contemporaries of Hemingway, like Isaac Asimov and Gertrude Stein, deserved to win the award far more and never did.

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He loved green turtles and hawks-bills with their elegance and speed and their great value and he had a friendly contempt for the huge, stupid loggerheads, yellow in their armour-plating, strange in their love-making, and happily eating the Portuguese men-of-war with their eyes shut.

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The premise is that an elderly, unlucky fisherman catches a very big fish and suffers the entire time, coming and going.

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It’s a slim novel and beyond the very simple plot, it consists almost entirely of the man speaking to himself, to a god he doesn't believe in, and to the fish.

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You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

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We aren't given anything to chew on. It's a book about suffering.

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If the reader stretches for positives to be found in this novel, we notice that the fisherman never loses hope. That said, I would not recommend this.

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