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'The Old Man and the Sea' rating:  
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I think that this is by some distance Hemingway's best work. It is a tale of the utmost simplicity, told with a supernatural clearness and lack of artifice. The old man in question spends days out to sea, struggling in solitude with a huge marlin which he has hooked; he eventually pulls it in, and heads towards shore. On the way back, his luck runs out. There is something very moving in the old man's lonely struggle; the book's beauty lies in the fact that there is not a word out of place, and no cluttering hyperbole or pretension. In this, it is rather like the short stories of Liam O'Flaherty, or the music of Arvo Part. Click
here to buy it in paperback ($7.20), or to read more reviews. |
