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jpmad 's review for:
The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
This is a short book, jus over 120 pages, you can read it in less time that you would spend watching the last Avengers movie, and it will be a much better way of spending this 2 or 3 hours.
I am not going over the plot, everyone here should already know that this is the famous book about the old man, on a boat, trying to get a fish way to big and strong for him. I reckon that anything beyond this description may spoil your reading.
The Old Man and The Sea is much more about what is not writen than what it is. The only catch here is that many authors omit something from their books because they don't know exactly the subject they are writing about, this only creates empty places. Hemingway knows a lot about fishing, about Cuba, and about growing old. That way, when he left something out of the book, is enough to cause really strong sensations on the reader.
Let's take Santiago for instance, we do not know almost anything about this old man. We have only two facts about his past, he once met lions in Africa and once had an arm wrestling agains a really big black man that lasted 24 hours. He is not telling anything else about Santiago past, hiding almost everything, and that is more than enough to trigger our imagination. Who is that guy? Where he came from? What are his believes?
Another great thing about this book is that the first time I read (over 10 years ago), I quite enjoyed the adventure. The old man fighting against the fish, the nature, proving his own strengh. But as time goes by, I started to think that this simple view is just the tip of the iceberg. The meaning of the book for me started to change and I started to understand and feel many other things that were completely ignored the first time.
I am not going over the plot, everyone here should already know that this is the famous book about the old man, on a boat, trying to get a fish way to big and strong for him. I reckon that anything beyond this description may spoil your reading.
The Old Man and The Sea is much more about what is not writen than what it is. The only catch here is that many authors omit something from their books because they don't know exactly the subject they are writing about, this only creates empty places. Hemingway knows a lot about fishing, about Cuba, and about growing old. That way, when he left something out of the book, is enough to cause really strong sensations on the reader.
Let's take Santiago for instance, we do not know almost anything about this old man. We have only two facts about his past, he once met lions in Africa and once had an arm wrestling agains a really big black man that lasted 24 hours. He is not telling anything else about Santiago past, hiding almost everything, and that is more than enough to trigger our imagination. Who is that guy? Where he came from? What are his believes?
Another great thing about this book is that the first time I read (over 10 years ago), I quite enjoyed the adventure. The old man fighting against the fish, the nature, proving his own strengh. But as time goes by, I started to think that this simple view is just the tip of the iceberg. The meaning of the book for me started to change and I started to understand and feel many other things that were completely ignored the first time.