I had not planned on reading any more Hemingway after For Whom the Bell Tolls, but while visiting my parents I found, among some children’s books like Bunnicula (which I loved when I was ten), a first edition of The Old Man and the Sea which, according to the inscription in the front, was a gift to my grandfather from his sister for Christmas in 1952. As it was a very short book, I finished it in one sitting.

While I still think that The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway’s best novel, The Old Man and the Sea does highlight Hemingway’s enduring strength in portraying the struggle of man against adversity. He is inevitably at his best when man (and I mean “man” specifically, with all the stoic perseverance and pragmatic logic one can impart upon a man who is mature and fully aware of the world around him) is fighting hopeless odds. He knows that the odds will ever be against him and that there is no place for him to hold out hope, yet he must fight and hope nonetheless. As Hemingway put it in The Old Man and the Sea, “a man can be destroyed but not defeated”. It is not a world of empty braggadocio, where “that which does not kill me makes me stronger”. It is a world of relentless attrition: Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive.

The “old man”, Santiago, manages to kill his eighteen-foot marlin, but it is too big to draw into his tiny boat. Although he defends his catch against shark after shark, eventually his weapons are torn from him in their death throes and his fish is slowly eaten until only the skeleton remains. He is alone for most of the book with only his thoughts and his prayers, hoping that God will help him bring his catch in and allow him to survive. He is an older version of Robert Jordan, the doomed American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War in For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, in this story, all extraneous story lines have been chopped away, leaving the reader with nothing but the stark reality of Santiago’s solitary struggle and unmitigated failure.

By virtue of its brevity and focus, The Old Man and the Sea has much to recommend it and in many ways is the epitome of what Hemingway’s writing is about. After having read and despised the tortured and artificial love story of For Whom the Bell Tolls, I was happy to read a novel by the same author that had nothing about love in it. I can recommend The Old Man and the Sea as being fully equal to The Sun Also Rises in its ability to actually move the reader.