Between the Lines discussion

I would have to say this is a wonderful book. Great determination to acheive what might seem an unacheivable goal. Then to survive. Great lessons from this book and it is wonderfully written. One of my favorite Hemingway novels.

I love all almost all his books. He treats words like gold and does not waste a single one.

haha I don't hate many books, but I hated this one! If you read the title you know the entire book...an old man and a sea.

For such a short book, this one went on and on and on....

That's exactly what I thought Petra.

I read this in school, waaaayyy back in the day :)
Then I bought it and reread it as it appears on the Lost Lit List.... I really liked it. Short, full of suffering and overcoming challenges....

Kandice wrote: "I love all almost all his books. He treats words like gold and does not waste a single one."

Your comment is right on target. Hemingway was a very slow and careful writer. Every day, he'd reread everything he'd written in the novel he was writing before continuing.

If he managed to add a single good sentence then he considered the day successful.

His love of words eventually proved tragic. According to one version I read, Hemingway was asked by the incoming Kennedy administration to write a short speech for the inauguration.

He couldn't. Serious case of writer's block. There may have been other contributing factors, but the humiliating embarrassing failure for a man with an outsized ego led to his suicide.

Apply his obsessive nature about words to the Old Man and the Sea and you get a nice metaphor about fishing - or is it the other way around?

Hemingway is criticized for his depiction of manly men doing manly things with guns and women.

Yes, there is that, but I also prefer to see his writing as a depiction of the high cost of obsessive prideful behavior of men who struggle (and always fail) to live up to their deluded idealized vision of themselves as men.

I consider his best book The Sun Also Rises - it is about a man who is impotent - or, to be exact, who lost his penis in the war. Jake Barnes is one of the archtypes of 20th C. literature.

Could Hemingway see his shadow rising to meet him? Another contributing factor to his suicide is, reportedly, his impotence - both sexual and artistic.

Yes, The Old Man and the Sea can be monotonous but that conveys the obsessiveness. As Lori said, he eventually triumphs over adversity - as did Jake Barnes, who, at least, came to terms with his.

Unfortunately, Hemingway did not do as well in the end as did the old man in the sea.

We studied it recently for GCSE, and I hated it at first. But now I've come to appreciate it quite deeply. Sure, it isn't the most emotionally-charged book, nor does a great deal happen, but it's quite beautiful and the symbolisms interesting.

I thought both the film and the book were very slow. I enjoyed the book more than the film.

I completely agree with Tom and Kandice. Hemingway was brilliant. he just loved his words and picked them so carefully.