The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

This episode of Zero to Well Read is sponsored by thriftbooks.com. It's The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. And as you might expect with something that's well known as this, there's a ton of editions. And let me just say, I didn't really think about how many iterations of man, boat, giant fish, ocean you could see and still have a lot of them look really cheesy. It's really remarkable achievement of human non-creativity to see what's all available there. You can go through thriftbooks.com and scroll through. You're going to see a lot of cheesy ones, but you're going to see some ones that aren't cheesy. The Spanish language ones are especially cool. My pick is a February 1999 UK edition that has a really cool Modernist edition drawing illustration. But you know, go pick out the one you want there. It would make a great gift for Father's Day, Mother's Day, someone who wants a beach side read and accessible, easy to get into classic, which we're going to talk about right now thanks to thriftbooks.com for sponsoring this episode of Zero to Well Read. Welcome to Zero to Well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. Jeff, this week you're going to want to pour yourself something strong and rum based, which I know is in your wheelhouse. Today we are heading out with Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. I am so thrilled to be able to talk about Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea and the whole Hemingway Industrial Complex, which will be something we talk about today. The inherited image of Hemingway that so many people have. I don't know how many authors could stand, could bear the ongoing Hemingway lookalike contest that they have every year in Key West. Like there's just not that many where you could do something like this. Like maybe Mark Twain and I'm out. I don't even know who's next on the list. Mark Twain has the hair. Like Hemingway, it's entirely about the Riz. Yeah, it's a cable net sweater, a strong beard and a square jaw. That's kind of what you're getting in for there. So a really cool time to reappraise Hemingway, who I think you'll find listeners in the course of this show, at least from my point of view, and looking at Rebecca's notes, this is not who Hemingway is not who everyone thinks Hemingway is. Is that but more indifferent and undermines it and subverts it in all kinds of interesting way? In Old Man and The Sea, this is 100 pages, not even. Not even. My copy was 83 pages plus a bunch of supporting material. You can get through this in an hour and a half. Right. So a really cool entree. And then I love books about fishing and the sea. So I'm very much in my bag here. You have a shout out you wanted to do. Yeah, we want to do a shout out to our listener Melody or Melanie, who is a librarian. She reported in and said that she has seen spikes in some of the titles that we've talked about here on Zero to Well Read in her library systems, holds and book requests. Of course, some books are always popular or trending in a bunch of places right now and those we can't tie ourselves to. But she saw pops for little women, 100 years of solitude, the Joylet Club and Go Tell It on the Mountain, which I haven't seen anywhere else on big book properties lately, which tells us that a lot of y'all are picking these up as we talk about them and are reading along with us. And we just think that that is super cool. We also heard from another librarian in Australia that there is no a two month hold on the audio edition of Bartleby the Scrivener, which is maybe the best thing that's ever happened in my bookish career to know that we could have contributed to that. So if you're out there and you're picking up these books, you are not alone in doing that. And if you are a librarian or a bookseller or somebody who's connected and can see this kind of data, we can't see the mysterious workings of Amazon book sales. And we would love to hear from you and have any insights that you might have. And so you can always email us of course at zero to wellread at book riot.com. Yeah, it's hard to know with this stuff that's like adaptation, like weathering heights or Project Hail Mary, there's plenty of other knows that those aren't us. But I mean, this is actually a pretty good example this week, Rebecca Oldman and see by Hemingway probably has a pretty steady sales. I mean, I'm sure it doesn't vary that much maybe summertime. It's probably still taught in schools, though I think that's more like Hills like White Elephants or short stories here. But this one I'd be curious to see if people are picking this up. And this is one thing we never know. Like we see the download numbers or whatever. But what percentage of those people are matriculating into getting the book from their library picking up their shelf or buying it the bookstore. So we will always appreciate your stories if you want to send those to us zero to wellread at book riot.com. Let's see, you can find the link in the show notes to our email address but also our Patreon. After the show today, we're going to do our office hours that's available to one of our levels of the Patreon member. I was going to suggest to you, Rebecca, we usually don't talk about this ahead of time, but I found the link to the 1917 Kansas City Star Style Guide, which is going to be important here in a minute. And I thought maybe we just run down the style recommendations from 1917 and Kansas City Star and evaluate writing was like, you know, more than 100 years ago, we'll talk about some other things there too, whatever comes into our minds. So also in addition, we'll be doing a little bit of close reading here at the office hours level. So, you know, kind of a grab bag of things to talk about. So that could be interesting. That's at patreon.com slash zero to wellread. You can also go there to find our free weekly newsletter that are managing at our Vanessa Diaz curates for us. She takes stuff from the show, things she's found. I'm sure she will then drop a link to that 1917 Kansas City Star Style Guide that I just referenced. Lots of stuff you can find also early in ad-free access. And if you don't, if you want to do something to help us keep the show going, Rebecca, what can people do? People can rate or review the show wherever you're listening. If you're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever other secret podcatcher you might be using, just tap that five star button. If you've got a little extra time and you'd like to leave a review, that of course helps us know how we're doing, but more importantly, helps other people who are looking for a books podcast find their way to us. And we do know that folks are finding the shows because of this. So thanks again to everybody who has rated and reviewed. And we know from a lot of folks who wrote into the Mailbag episode that aired last week as you're hearing this, that people are interested in deepening your reading skills, sharpening those tools. So that's the kind of stuff that we get further into over on Office Hours today. Certainly will be one of those if you want to come over and join us. All right, Rebecca, weirdly even a shorter synopsis than Bartleby the Scrivener, which is manifestly about not doing things. Yeah. And so much weirder Bartleby the Scrivener. Old man in the sea, this is pretty straightforward. But as you would put it simple, but not easy. This is a story about an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago. He has gone 84 days without a catch when he finally lands a huge marlin way out in the Gulf Stream. He spends three days and nights fighting the fish. It's larger than his skiff. It probably weighs 1500 pounds. And he eventually reels it in close enough to strike it with a harpoon and lash it to the skiff throughout the fight. And his arduous journey back, sharks are attacking the marlin because it's just trailing along in the water next to him. And they are taking out sizable chunks. But then later they attack it in a pack and strip it down to bare bones. Just heartbreaking stuff. Santiago arrives back home after this three day, three night battle, weary but not defeated, which Hemingway tells us over and over. And he's greeted by his young friend, Manolin, who comes to bring him coffee the next morning and they make plans to fish again. And that's it. That's it. Old man in the sea. You can read this in an hour. If you hustle, I guess I would encourage people not to hustle. There is something don't hustle. Hemingway style can lead itself to reading quickly. And that's one of the strange paradoxes is as spare as it can be. It's also quite beautiful. And you can just it's so frictionless that you can just sort of take it in. It's an interesting candidate to do our first sort of dedicated close reading segment in office hours, because it's notoriously resistant to it. Like you've really got squint. Much like Santiago is looking for bird sign and like slight differences in the air and water. That's kind of what you have to do with Hemingway to see what's going on because it is so subtle. And it's manifestly about omitting things, which we're going to talk about here in a little bit as well. It's so fascinating to think about Hemingway's career because you and I, people of our age and older, come to Hemingway where the legend of Hemingway is full formed. But very much wasn't even laid in his career. This is his last great work. Hemingway himself said it's the best thing I've ever written and the best thing I ever will write. It's the only title that's cited in his Nobel Prize Award specifically. And it came out just a couple of years before. And so it's hard to realize that at this moment he had been lauded in the 20s and 30s. But his career was very much waned, not even waning. It was waned by the time he did this. And if this book doesn't happen, I think our sense of Hemingway is much more in the line of, I don't know, like John DeSpaeus or, you know, he was very or not even Fitzgerald because Fitzgerald has a monumental work, The Great Gatsby earlier and The Great Gatsby has lived longer. I don't know that people would be coming to, the sun also rises or fell with arms in the way they do now without this late work, Rebecca. Is that your sense of it too when you're looking at the back story of this particular book and how it came to be? I think that's right. And the origins of the old man in the sea are from a 1936 piece that Hemingway wrote for Esquire called On the Blue Water, a Gulf Stream Letter. And in that he's trying to explain the appeal of Gulf Stream fishing to a friend who's really into big game hunting. And the friend is like, dude, I don't get the appeal of being in a boat and little fish when you could have the adrenaline rush of taking down an elephant. And Hemingway writes that letter to him. And I thought did a really beautiful job of trying to help him experience or understand what it's like for all of the senses to be out on the Gulf Stream like that. There's a Hemingway library edition of the book that you can get that has that 1936 piece in the back. Really helpful to have that material. So he drafts this in 1936, Esquire publishes it. And then basically it's in the drawer and simmering on the backburners of Hemingway's mind while the Spanish Civil War is happening and then World War II. And Hemingway is living through and working through both of those. He doesn't come back to this story until 1950. It's like a lot of things could have gone sideways that would have prevented this from ever coming out into the world. And I think it's a really interesting contrast to somebody's career like Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby where that book flopped while he was alive and Fitzgerald, as you can hear in the very first episode of this podcast, he died thinking it was a failure. And something happens that resurrects it. That of course could have happened to Hemingway if this had just been buried before he died. But it's so unlikely. And that it comes out, it really cements his legacy. This came out in 1952. As you said, it's the last of his works to be published. And then he died in 1961. So this is like the capstone on Hemingway's career and in many ways, I think, as he thought, his greatest work. I also, this is something you and I are interested in from the nuts and bolts of publishing and distribution and how things are put together. I think it's wildly important to know that it was published in Life Magazine concurrently with the book where you could get it for 20 cents. I didn't find these prices. This is a great find by you. I didn't think to look for this. Thank you. So I knew it was out there and was available. And if you subscribe to Life Magazine, which along with time were the, it's hard to overestimate how important those magazines were at this particular cultural moment, more than five million in the first copies of Life sold out to the point where it was bootlegged, like you were people were like making photocopies and getting it around. It was a sensation at the time. Today's episode is brought to you by Green Leaf Book Group, publisher of Average Civil Employee, a novel of bureaucratic absurdities by Stephen J. Wallace. Government employee ACE is trying to do good work and basically survive as his agency, despite a slew of efficiency mandates that actually make his job less efficient and put more personnel at risk for layoffs. When in a moment of honesty, he expresses his frustration with the new counter productive initiatives, he's pushed into a quote unquote intervention presented as a series of ACE's journal entries. Average civil employee pulls no punches as it critiques ill-conceived approaches to make the government more efficient. This satirical novel will have you laughing out loud at the absurd situations and the reality of ACE's everywhere. I think we need levity when it comes to the government and issues surrounding the government. So this feels right on time. The author's first novel, Hazardous Lies, is award-winning. So make sure to check out Average Civil Employee by Stephen J. Wallace. And thanks again to Green Leaf Book Group for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Source Books Landmark, publisher of The Mountains We Call Home by Kim Michelle Richardson. Now if you like something that's bookish, that's southern, that's heartwarming, but gets into the nitty gritty of life, this is for you. So in this deeply moving standalone and companion novel to the New York Times bestselling, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek series, our heroine for the age's legendary book woman, Cussie Lovett, returns home. It's a powerful testament to strength, survival, and the magic of the printed word wrapped into a vivid portrait of Kentucky life, examining incarceration and criminalization, the effects on the poor and powerless, and the consequences of fractured family bonds, along with nostalgic glimpses of a bustling, multifaceted Louisville. There are also heartwarming portraits of reading efforts in every facet of life. It really has everything that you need wrapped up into one book. Check out The Mountains We Call Home by Kim Michelle Richardson. And thanks again to Source Books Landmark for sponsoring this episode. Every week we cover the week's tech news on This Week in Tech. Hi, this is Leo Laporte inviting you to join me and my panelists this week, Jason Heiner, Doc Rock, and Mike Elgin will talk about Anthropics' new AI. They say it's too dangerous to release Sam Altman in response to the fire bombing of his house, and Samsung jumps profits eightfold thanks to AI. You'll find Twitter, Twitter.tv, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, and that's kind of the opposite of what happens with short stories that are published today. Many times the short stories for well-known authors, we just interviewed Louise Erdrich for the Book Riot podcast, come out in The New Yorker, or a magazine like that first, and then a year or two or even decades later, those stories get collected and put into a book. It's very rare that an author gets a novella-length short story published by itself, which this was. This 80-something page story comes out by itself in a standalone hardcover that sold for $3 in 1952. That's about $36 today, so inflation has kept up with hardcover pricing. But it was only that copy of Life Magazine, which was available at the exact same time. You didn't have to wait until the paperback came out, or until some exclusivity period for the hardcover was over. It came out at exactly the same time, 20 cents, which is about $250 today, so much more affordable. Hemingway was stoked for this because it meant that so many more people were going to be able to read his story. People who wouldn't have been able to afford $3 or $36 today on the print copy of the novel got to read it in Life Magazine. That also contributes to the legend of Hemingway, that it's possible to become such a legend because 5 million people are reading your story in two weeks. That's just not a thing that happens today. I had this for you. We're going to play make Rebecca guess something. So Rebecca, I'd like you to guess. This is a copy of that life. I'm looking on eBay right now. Old Man in the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Complete new book, first publication, Life Magazine, September 1st, 1952. It's not graded or anything, but it's like a little dinged around the edges. It's been lived and read, but it's a usable copy, but not pristine by any sense of the word. Would you like to guess how much it is to buy right now? It's not an auction. It's a buy it now feature on eBay right now. Can I ask you any questions about it? Or do you just want me to take a fire? Ask what question you're going to ask, and I will decide if I'm going to allow it after I know what you're going to ask. Do you think I'm more likely to air on the high side or the low side? I will not be answering that question. Okay. I mean, I'll say this. 5 million is a lot of magazines. That's where I was going to start. 5 million is a lot of copies. So these weren't rare to begin with, but it's been 75 years. It's been 75 years. So they might be kind of rare now, but copies of the Old Man in the Sea as a book are not rare or hard to come by at all. I'll give you one more hint. I might think about buying this. You might think, okay. And you know, I'm not a collector. People might not know. I mean, I care about books or whatever, but I'm not like, yeah, anyway. And you're also not one to like splash out on a luxury item just because. No. So that's helpful. $250. A very good guess. $169.99 right now. Okay. If you wanted to be a collector. You can get them for as cheap as $95, it looks like, for one that's deemed up. Interesting. And it looks like a signed one, a signed version. Again, I don't know about the provenance. So buyer beware. Okay. That's $500. Okay. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So it's pretty cool. That is an affordable piece of literary history to get for $150 to $200. I mean, this is an item and it's got a wonderful picture of him at the cover, as you might imagine. It does. I was going to point that out. I was looking at for the cover of the magazine when I was doing research here. And the cover of Life Magazine just says Hemingway, a new story. The original cover of the book also just says Hemingway. They don't have earnest on them anywhere. Like he was at Beyonce level, single name recognition. I mean, it's true. If you meet anyone named Hemingway, you immediately think of earnest Hemingway. You just, I mean, there's no, there's no getting around that at the same time. I think the other thing that goes into what these are signs of that life agreed to this, that they priced the novella this way, that it was a novella, it all suggests it shows. And Hemingway talks about this and other people have that editors and agents and people he showed it too early were super jazzed about this. Like notoriously difficult in culture and books to know if something is going to move. But people are like, we've got something here. And Rebecca, they were right. They had something here. They had something here. In addition to those five million copies of Life Magazine selling out the first print run of the book does really well. And it was highly acclaimed. Just immediately, you can still find the original New York Times review of the book, which is like, this is Ernest Hemingway at his best. William Faulkner also reviewed it. He said, this is his best time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us. I mean, his and my contemporaries, William Faulkner, who also didn't like Hemingway, they feel it. So that really means something. As you know, my favorite kind of praise is through gritted teeth. Yeah. So this is very much a they couldn't help but say it's awesome. He wraps it up with this time he discovered God, a creator. Like, wow. What does your let's settle down radar do with that? If it were coming from anybody other than William Faulkner, I think that would flag my let's settle down. But I take this to mean that like Faulkner, especially because he didn't like Hemingway and was not effusive as a person or a writer. This is really significant. Also, it's been competitive for writers. It stays competitive for writers. Like, even if they had liked each other, they there would have been competition in, you know, namespace and for book sales. And anytime two writers of this caliber are kind of up against each other and one of them sees something in the other that makes them say, you know what, like, he just did it better than I did. This is the best that any of us is ever going to do. Like, generationally, this is the best. I want to sit up and pay attention to that because that takes humility and that's really important. On the other hand, I will say Faulkner had won the Nobel Prize in 1949. So he got there first. So maybe he was in a mood to little welcome to the club. Well, just, you know, he had some humility to spare. Do you think anyone called Ernest Hemingway Ernie? I feel like he might punch you in the throat for that. I mean, I also possibly but remember, we're pre-muppets. I think the Muppets have done something to the name Ernie because like, Ernie Banks, the baseball player, that was the that was the dominant Ernie before the Muppets. And that was like masculinity baseball, which is all over old man in the sea, which I had forgotten how much to mageo and baseball. There's an old man in the sea. I don't know if I said this, but Hemingway said he thought it was the best writing he'd ever done and would ever do. This isn't the hard to quantify, but people have heard of the old man in the sea, Rebecca, but that sounds reductive, but it matters. Like it just by itself with Hemingway, it feels like a cultural document to its detriment that people feel like they know what the gist is. And they're both right and wrong about that. But it has a life outside of any experience of the writing of it or the reading of it or even the Hemingwayness of it. It is to use a phrase we've been using recently, it's escaped containment, even of its own text. And that matters at the same time as well. And I think it also solidifies, even though its variations on it's quite different in some regards to the spare, stripped down prose of especially something like hell's like white elephants, which is I think the most often taught of the short stories, but it is like that, but it's also different. They're quite long sentences here, but there's not very much punctuation omission is the principle mode that Hemingway is known for, like say less weirdly, Gertrude Stein got there first, no needless words is actually one of her dictums. But very much in this post World War One, as I believe Henry James says, World War One used all the words. And so there was finding some other way to convey emotion, humanist, interiority and experience. And this is the crowning jewel of Hemingway's career. And I think probably the crowning jewel of that mode of style. And it's really hard to go back and for stylists, right, to go back and find the someone who really moved the needle on style, even if they weren't the only person, it's like Joyce and Faulkner and Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf. And then later Morrison, who was also looking at Faulkner like, we don't get many is what I'm trying to say. We don't get me of these. It was before and after and the sentences weren't altered because of this person. It's deceptively simple, you know, like because the language is so straightforward, because the sentences are uncomplicated. When I read Hemingway, for the first time, I think it was my freshman year of high school. And it wasn't old man in the sea, but the teacher, my teacher contrasted it with the great Gatsby. We read them right up against each other. And I remember a writing assignment after that, that was then take either the style of Fitzgerald or Hemingway and write a story like, here's the topic, but you pick which style you're going to mimic. And I took Hemingway because I took Fitzgerald because I was like, well, we can be flowery, like I can purple up some prose and show that I demonstrate that I, you know, know what Fitzgerald was doing. But a lot of people I remember took Hemingway and struggled through it. It's not easy as it looks. It's not easy to convey as much as Hemingway conveys with as few words as he manages to do it. It's really remarkable. Like there are 350 page full length novels about these same ideas that don't do it nearly as well as Hemingway does it in 80 pages. Yeah, all right, let's get into a little Hemingway backstory. We could do, you know, a mini series on Hemingway and so much is written about Hemingway and writing about writing about Hemingway. But let's just put some of the basic pieces you've born in Oak Park, Illinois, his dad was a doctor, his mom was a musician, forced him to play the cello. I didn't remember that. I was doing my Hemingway research and he played the cello. I hope he was better than I was. I was generally acknowledged to be the world's worst cello player in middle school. And then very, you know, he did well in English class. He did not go to college. So this is something to know. I'm going to put this right here. None of the war hunting, drinking, fishing was a put on. Like he did all of this stuff and did it early. He went to war shortly after war broke out. But his first experience out of high school was he was a cupboard quarter for the Kansas City Star, spent just I think six or nine months only there. But it's super influential for him because the writing style, the telling the story, you don't have a you literally don't have space to do a lot. And finding the heart of the story and conveying it simply and evocatively was the order of the day. And then he goes to war. He was rejected from serving in the US Army during World War One because of eyesight. And so he's like, he could have got out of it, Rebecca, but he didn't. He volunteered for the Italian Red Cross, essentially, and drove an ambulance. He wasn't there too long, I think maybe less than a few months when he was caught in action and nearly had his leg blown off, spent six months in an army hospital, basically trying to do hand signals to Italian doctors about whether or not he's going to lose his leg. And was forever altered by that experience. He won, I don't remember the exact name of the medal, but whatever the Italian Medal of Freedom was, right? He got one of those at the same time. And then sort of comes back and he's in 1819, right? He's very young at this point and comes back and does some more writing and then starts to write short stories. And then, you know, goes to Paris, he gets married to Hadley. I think it's so interesting to know he was so connected to despassos and other people like see what go to Paris, then leaves Paris to move to Key West. By the way, my remembrance of it was that he was a much older man when he moved to Key West. He was only like 28. He was like 29. It's like 1928, 29. Yeah, I mean, this is like one of the things that I was marveling at with Fitzgerald too when we did Great Gatsby. It's like he was so young when he's writing about these big issues of life, the universe, and everything. And this is, I think, the origin of the Hemingway has almost like Ron Swanson type character. Yes, definitely. Yes. Like whiskey drinking with Hemingway, it was rum, but like drinking stoic, doodly dude, like man of few words, but I will be out there doing the thing. And that mythology is both grounded in reality and also just exceeds who the man was at this point in every possible direction. He went through, I mean, in the decade before Old Man and Scene, he went through a fairly heavy fallow period, wrote a couple of things that weren't regarded very well, and he went through a fairly serious bout of depression right after World War II. He spent a lot of time in World War II doing journalism. He went to the Spanish Civil War, reported from the front lines, won another award from the US Army for basically Valor and war reportage. But then his friends started dying and Maxwell Perkins, to whom Old Man and Scene is co-dedicated dies, like an editor of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and an underrated, well, there's a movie made about Maxwell Perkins, so he can't really be underrated as editors go. But other people were dying, those passers was dying, like his friends were dying. And he was depressed and he didn't know if his life had amounted to much. He didn't know if he was ever going to write anything great again. And so I think I want to highlight to undercut the stoic-ness, much like Parks and Rec tries to undercut this Ron Swanson-ness of it, where he actually does like puzzles, right? Like he actually does, you know, he actually does like some of these things that the facade doesn't, it doesn't comport with the facade. I think that's very much in the Hemingway vein where he was a loner, but he wanted to connect. He was valuable and gruff, but he was also introverted and thoughtful and complicated to be sure at the same time. And this was the first time I had touched the Old Man in the Sea since high school, and I was surprised by the depth of feeling that is conveyed, because I'm also susceptible to the mythology of Hemingway and the like, that man of few words, still waters run deep kind of thing that he's portrayed as like the writing is so sharp and almost clinical that it's easy to portray him as having been like dry or unfeeling or cold. And it's clear that there's like real sincere depth of feeling from this person about all sorts of things, like coming out of multiple wars, coming out of probably what would have been thought of as PTSD today from nearly having your leg blown off and then watching all of your friends die. Of course, he's depressed. But if you're, if we're talking about a writer who dealt with significant depression, we are by definition then talking about a writer who was dealing with serious deep like abundant emotion. And just because the writing is quiet does not mean that it lacks feeling. And that was how powerful the feeling is. And this was really fun to see. And not only doesn't foreclose it, I actually think the common understanding is basquards in this regard, which is the leanness of the writing is not really about denying feeling or emotion, but honoring and channeling what writing can do to surface it by direct description with subtly a nuance. You know, people are feeling beings. And if you evoke rather than Claire, you can harness some other kind of reaction. And this is not just me. I mean, he said things to this effect, like you may have heard of this iceberg theory, right? He articulated in 1964 and death in the afternoon, which came a lot later. This is direct quotation here. If a writer of prose knows enough of what he's writing about, he may omit things he knows. And the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due only to one eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow things in his writing. This is continues on. You could admit anything if you knew that you admitted it and you were omitted the part that would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood. And I think that part is important where he wants to get you to feel something kind of like a magic trick where you're not sure how it's working. And he believed, and I think I agree with this, Rebecca, that's something you and I have talked about recently, of like, if you can do the thing by saying less of like, look at that thing and look at the thing I'm doing, that is more powerful than saying it directly or like having being able to point with your fingers like, this is the moment where I started feeling that thing, we're sort of drawn out of you and it emerges and you don't know the source of it. That feels transcendent. I don't know another word for it. It puts me in mind of our shared favorite book from last year, Audition by Katie Ketemura and the general vibe of reading Katie Ketemura, which is that that it's very spare, but very rich, because it evokes and draws you to your own feelings rather than to hear is what the character is feeling and let me tell you all of the things, but that the sureness of Hemingway, like the confidence of the writing that I can say this in so few words and it will convey, can only come from a place of also deep expertise and familiarity. He knows what it's like to be the guy in the boat and that is irreplaceable and essential to get to the kind of writing that he's doing here. He's extraordinarily interested to have this down to what it's about here in a minute, maybe this is a good transition. He's extraordinarily interested and was from, as far as I know, really as early as son also rises, he was interested in mastery and expertise and what that allowed. One of the reasons he so was fascinated by the Matador was the economy of movement and the line is the purity of the line of the Matador, where doing as much as they could with as little but still could kill the bull and do it with style and flair and people wouldn't really understand, but also they would understand the level of expertise and goes to it. And Tiantago is a kind of Matador is interesting and why the animal is the antagonist or the thing on the other end of the purity of that line. This one's a quite literal line, but it's about can you, how well do you know that thing so that you're only making subtle adjustments that you know when to be still, you know when to act, you know when to wait, you can read the signs for the long experience and expertise and knowledge that it doesn't even look like you're working. And then, of course, that's about modern writing and everything that's going on at the same time. In addition to mastery of writing and developing that art, Hemingway was an accomplished angler in the summer of 1935 in Bimini. He was the first person to bring in a bluefin tuna that was unscathed by sharks using a technique that he pioneered. And so by the time then a year later that he's writing that letter to the friend trying to explain the appeal of this kind of fishing, he's done this. He knows how to do it. And 15 years later, he picks up the story again and starts to craft Santiago around things that he knew experientially. Like there are moments in the book where Santiago, like the fish is on the line and it's a heavy rope and he's turning, he's constantly turning and putting the rope over one shoulder and like leaning into it and then switching sides and putting the rope over the other shoulder. And you can picture Hemingway out in the ocean in a skiff with a huge fish on the line doing the same thing because he did it. And like that sort of embodied knowledge of what a character is feeling is a thing that is really hard to fake. And Hemingway's not faking it. And I think the fact that it's so authentic is one of the things that makes this really compelling and make it so sticky for readers. Yeah. So what's like this? What is it all about? So big ideas in reading experience. Like you have here it's epic in harrowing and yet it's a dude on a boat, right? Yeah. You have later what are the great fishing novels? I have, I was thinking about dude on a boat story. So we're talking castaway. What that Robert Redford one, I don't remember what that was called, where it's just on a boat, life of Pi, Joan and the Whale, like dude on a boat is a really, it is epic stuff. Like, yes, you know, in your high school reading taxonomy, this is both man versus nature and man versus himself, because he's just out there in the boat alone and the fish is out there in the sea. And it's about persistence and perseverance and a whole ton of like good old fashioned Catholic symbolism. Even though Hemingway insisted and told a historian named Bernard Baronson that there isn't any symbolism, he said the sea is the sea, the old man is the old man, the boy is the boy and the fish is the fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse. Sometimes writers say this recently, we talked about Andy, we are saying this about Project Hail Mary, like this insistence that there's not any symbolism, which maybe it didn't feel that way, but this is going like back to the iceberg, it's going on below the surface in Hemingway and those unconscious things bubble up into the writing. Can I try out something on you, Rebecca? Because I was thinking about this, there's a way of reading this that is the sea is the sea, and I think that's one reason it becomes so popular is it's kind of, it's a riveting yarn on its surface level. If you don't get any below the waves at all. I think the idea of a very simplistic idea of symbolism as being the mechanism by which a story accesses ideas that aren't explicitly articulated is a hindrance to people thinking about what a text can mean. So yes, maybe there's not symbolism in a direct way need to intend it, but there are things that are represented and things that are included and excluded in this book that connect to ideas that are not directly overtly topics of the book. If you want to call that symbolism, great. But if you don't, that's okay too. Yeah, I think the story is also about more than other things than fish and boys and seas. It just is. I think that's right. I will not entertain any other way of thinking about this. It's right and it's helpful. And I think that gets us helps us get outside of the like ninth grade English class reading of what does the fish symbolize? What does the fish symbolize? Right. Yeah. What does the green light at the end of Daisy's doc mean? But there's unconscious stuff that's in Hemingway. That's there's unconscious stuff in every writer that shows up in the text. And this is also a thing that we hear writers say a lot that they're surprised sometimes by the things that readers see because of course, readers are bringing themselves to the books as well. But just the biggest questions about life, like how do we do a really hard thing? But also can be read as you're saying on the surface level of what would an old man out in a boat by himself have to do to bring in a 1500 pound fish? And how long would that take? And what would it be like over the course of three days and three nights? And it's like it is harrowing. But because Hemingway has this economy of language and like my note is this is what we talk about when we talk about economy of language that you can say a lot with very little, it's it also feels really measured and almost meditative. There's repetition and what the old man has to do. And Hemingway is just making us sit there with Santiago, making us sit there in the boat, sit there with the struggle. And that I think that combination of the repetition and the just sitting in it is what makes the story so emotionally powerful. You cannot help but feel in yourself what it would be like to be there. Yeah, the away from the things of man is is really on display and how stripped down if you strip away some of those other things, then what emerges I think is interesting. You talk that goes back to the iceberg theory as well. You strip away the things you don't need. Then what you're left with is even more burnished, even more apparent, even more eminent and what you're trying to do here. I guess you have rugged manly man here in all caps of which I think is a good shorthand for a caricature version of Hemingway. I don't find that to be the case here. Clearly, you know, we get a whole like backstory about a days long arm wrestling match, which is clearly some masculine shit, as you say, but it's not just that. And if anything, that is a I don't know if a canard is the right thing, but it can be a distraction even for the character themselves. I think. This was my first real adult revisiting of Hemingway. And I was expecting more of that like rugged manly man overtly masculine stuff, given the sort of Hemingway of it all and the way that he's talked about in pop culture. I was really pleasantly surprised by how powerful his depictions of nature and Santiago's relationship to nature is. Like, I'm a person who spends a lot of time like looking at a tree and reading Mary Oliver poetry. And so I don't map on to what we might think of as a stereotypical Hemingway fan. But I think that's just because our stereotypes about Hemingway have become so separated from who he actually was. Calcified and one sided and what the writings actually like. I meant to say this in the who this is. And at some point when we if and when we get to other Hemingways like that have like ladies at all in it, we will need to get more and directly into his depictions of women and gender and race. There are readings of Hemingway that are quite damning and readings that are see a lot more complexity. So I do not want to gloss over because this particular book is not directly at stake, though I think it is indirectly at stake and some in some degrees that those some of his predictions, maybe all of them depending on you want to listen to or you can be compelled by or your own reading of The Sun Also Rises or you know many of the the novels where there are love interests and women and Jewish people and Black people more directly. It's not it's not smooth sailing for a contemporary understanding. Complicated to say but it's not really on it made me think of it because the one Black person we get here is this arm wrestler who at one point Santiago says who's a wonderful man and a wonderful arm wrestler. And that's kind of all we get Santiago himself his own racial identity is a little complicated. He's living in the Caribbean but he seems to be an immigrant from Spain. So how we think about his identity at this point kind of exceeds gets outside of a Black, white person of color, not person of color, especially in the location which he's in. I think it's we didn't say this but these are Spanish speaking people. This is all in English but we do get Hemingway relating Spanish sentence forms in English. I noticed especially when like the Tigers of Detroit we would not say that in English. We say the Detroit Tigers but in Spanish you'd say a different way. There's some other things that bleed into it here. So that's another piece of how Hemingway deals with racial, cultural, linguistic difference is pretty fascinating. There's been all kinds of critical work on how that appears here but on the other hand as you say I'm so glad you said this is about generosity and connection. Like he's trying to relate to his ward, his protégé, Fisher boy. He's trying to think of his connection to the fish. He's trying to think about his connection to nature. He's cross identifying with the small birds, right? He feels so bad for the little birds and how fragile they are. It's lovely and like I didn't expect to be using the word lovely talking about this book but there's this reciprocity between him, between Santiago and Manilin, the young boy and like that's the main attraction but Santiago also has this deep respect and connection for nature that that's the star for me. He's out there in this boat. He's like literally fighting for his life and he's looking at purposes and thinking they're good. They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish and then he's talking to the fish as he's reeling it in and saying fish I love you and respect you very much but I will see you dead before this day ends and there's just this humility to it as well. Like Santiago has a moment of saying man is not much beside the great birds and beasts that for being as like swashbuckling as our image of Hemingway is the character here is doing swashbuckly things but it's not swaggering. Like this is not a swaggering man. This is a man who's like he hasn't caught a fucking fish in 84 days. I mean I had forgotten it had been that he's one of the great dry spells and I think I have this in my quotes that he admits to himself and to the fish eventually that he's gone too far out. Like he's gone to extreme because he's desperate. He's thinking maybe he's lost it right. It's hard not to read Hemingway's own biography as being at play here a little bit. It's been a long time since he had a hit same with Santiago, a formerly great renowned fisher person who seems to be long in the tooth. He's just sort of trying to he's has to buy coffee on credit for God's sake. So that desperation really comes into play here. Let's see. Yeah. Long sentence description you say heroes and limit there are heroes and myths but also the limits of heroes and myth right. There's nested myth making happening if you think about it both on the level of the text and on the level of this you know supra text. So Santiago was the center of the story but his idol is Joe DiMaggio right who's a baseball player and you can actually identify the time this is by how they're relaying what they've heard Joe DiMaggio doing. It's like early September of 1950 because the Manilin and Santiago were talking about what DiMaggio is doing and what he hasn't done. DiMaggio of course the great hitter for the New York Yankees who had maybe an unbreakable record 56 game hitting streak probably will never be broken. People often talk about as one of the most unbreakable records in sports a myth mythic person of himself who his own father was a fisher person and of course the most famous of all fisher people the big G.C. that's all over this at the same time Hemingway's a fisher person and then Manilin is idolizing Santiago. So there's kind of a family tree of myths and one thing I think that's interesting about that too is that DiMaggio is not a happy person Santiago would you call him a happy person would you call Hemingway a happy person Christ is sacrificed like it doesn't go great for the legends right that's one of the ironies of the myth and the legend in this particular and Saint James is known as Santiago in Spanish you can you can hike the Camino de Santiago to Santiago de Compostela where Saint James is buried and there's all of this I've hiked a portion of it and there's all of this stuff along the way about the fishermen and the pilgrims carry scallop shells on on your packs now to you know pay homage and symbolize that you are a pilgrim on the way because that's what they did back then but even Santiago's name has a meaning here that connects us to the like legacies of fishing and also sort of the mythology and the symbolism of fishing yeah I also have I mean I'm one of the questions that this book asked that we don't we'll get to when we get to our our moral question our ass segment but what in the hell are we to make of the difference between humans in the natural world like literally what are we supposed to do because it's con Santiago and I think Hemingway and I think the book is very conflicted about say hunting and fishing even overtly like Santiago is driven to take this fish some of it is a economic reality like this is his occupation but he feels conflicted about it like here my brother but I must kill you like what the hell is that I don't really know what to do with that and I do not think Rebecca you tell me if you think differently I do not think that question is answered in the book I do not think it's comes to like this is how we should understand a really you know kind of any like Genesis humans are the masters of nature but also not you know you are my brothers and I'm going to kill you and I love porpoises and the dolphin fish but also I don't know I feel like Hemingway Santiago and the book are all very much like this is fraught I feel some connection here and yet yeah I agree with that I think that he's that's kind of the humility that I was talking about that there's a there's not any like joy of domination between Santiago and this fish and there's no desire to dominate it's and that also runs counter to the mythology that we have about Hemingway and that whole like Manly Man presentation that this trophy hunting like modern trophy hunting is like you pay a lot of money to bag a line on a reserve so you can get the picture of it with like you and your paramilitary gear the friend that Hemingway is writing that letter to that inspires this book same thing that guy is like but come on and take down some elephants with us and then you'll really know what life is about and Hemingway is like no dude it's out there in this boat you're just you in the sea and the fish and that's what that's what it's all about and that fraughtness is inescapable but that Santiago is bringing this humility if I love you and I've gone too far and I've made it too hard for both of us and like I'm sorry but this is how it has to be I have to kill you in order to survive myself both for food and for economic survival that I think if Hemingway has any answer it's not about like what to do but to try to approach that conflict between humans and the natural world the difficulty of that relationship with some kind of humility and respect ready to launch your business get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs Shopify is specially designed to help you start run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand marketing tools that get your products out there integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale ups online in person and on the go Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you sign up for your one dollar a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup yeah I I think the difference between fishing and hunting as both as pursuits but also as metaphors are interesting here like the kind of knowledge Santiago has to deploy the very limited technology right he has to have knowledge enough to catch bait that's big enough he has to catch a 10 pound tuna to use his bait right so there's there's so it's so stripped down it's his boat his harpoon and like a mile of coil and some hooks right this is not an elephant gun and infrared goggles and you know jeeps and stuff it's very like a little bit of human technology but mostly it's about knowledge of where the fish are what they're going to do when you catch them and then how to control your physical body what's asked of Santiago to catch this fish is categorically different than most fishing and hunting stories you're going to hear about a multi-day effort of will perseverance knowledge and sort of spiritual reckoning for lack of better term that happens at the same time well there's that like old saw that I've most of us have probably heard that like they shouldn't really they don't call it catching they call it fishing right that it's about it's truly about the attempt and like the patience and the waiting and like all of the things that go into and then and the kind of the practice of it like it's not language that Hemingway or Santiago uses but he's been out there in this boat every day for the last 84 days doing the same things you're using his tools making himself available if the fish want to come and you're still subject to just serendipity luck what's going to happen and you like you can't escape being subject to that and you have to continue practicing the thing like the only thing to do is to get in the boat and take all your gear and show up every day and hope that it works out that's what literature is metaphor so one thing that happens in in writing like Hemingway's where it tends to be more spare I guess what's the opposite? Vineland? Vineland is the opposite of Hemingway when you think there's so much it's hard to know what your eyes should affix to but one thing that happens here is we get so much fish we get so much sea we get so much fish we get so much sea that when we are told that he at this point in his life only can dream of lions when he dreams on the coast of Africa when he was a kid you can't help but notice like in football it's like a play action pass right you run the ball run the ball run the ball run the ball and then you pass it's like whoa a pass all of a sudden so you can't help notice this lion stuff it's like DiMaggio and the lions are the thing to me that kind of stick out that would not sort of be naturally fitting in just a story of someone on the sea if that's what you think that's all that's happening here I actually don't have a ready-made super confident read on the lions you have pride strength courage of course Jesus the lion aslan narnia that's you know that would be a little bit later but that he is still drinking of a he's still dreaming of a frontier of a different kind of predator is he the lion is subject to the lion I'm not sure what to do with it Rebecca but it would make a good ninth grade English essay if someone you know that there are dissertations about about all of that right straight thoughts a lot of straight thoughts on this one I spent some time really joking with my husband about how this book should actually be called the old man and the fish like this story is the old man and the fish there's probably also a dissertation somewhere about his choice to use the old man and the sea but at the longer that I you know tried to play the joke out the more I came around to like actually it's correct that it's the old man and the sea because that's the story is that he's out there with the sea every day and he's waiting for a fish but I do this giant mythological fish is sort of like it is the sea it's like the heart of the sea like the jewel from titanic like this is this this is the soul of the sea I'm wrestling with like like figuratively yeah um having these grandson Sean wrote the intro to the edition that I read and he cites the old man in the sea as the most marvelous piscatorial contribution of American literature above even Moby Dick which that's a flex but I loved the use of piscatorial I'm not sure I've heard that word before and that got me thinking what are the other great fishing novels like is it just this Moby Dick and a river runs through it I can't even think of anything else that's about fishing yeah I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of writing I mean like John Geerach yeah my there's a lot of nonfiction but in terms of novels I don't have anything that comes to the fore I have two ever thoughts about his grandson's sentence and I'd like to enter them into the record first of all I think Hemingway himself would have hated the word piscatorial just for the record okay piscatorial is relating to fish and Moby Dick is a whale and that's a mammal that is not even a fish so that's my note for Sean Hemingway. Well actually Sean Hemingway all right I'm just saying here we can't all be the greats. Like literally literally. All right the court of rightness sees your objection and recognizes it okay this is the one I really couldn't stop thinking about I cannot go on a five mile hike without worrying about whether I have enough water this whole thing is a dehydration nightmare he has one bottle of water we get descriptions of like the fish is on the line he's got the line towed over his shoulder so he only has one functioning hand and that hand is injured and he's got to like somehow get to the corner of the skiff that has the water bottle in it and take a little sip and just try to make it and I was just like oh my god like just the dehydration and like just the bodily experience of this felt so visceral to me but what it would be like to be in the sun and to be that thirsty while you're doing this intensely physical thing for three days and three nights. I had the same note that Santiago feels shockingly unprepared but I want to counterbalance that with he mentioned several times that I have gone out so far even says to the fish both for you and for me at one point but we get the repetition of that and one of the consequences of not having spent like there's a version of this story where we get like his earlier fishing adventures like what's a normal day look like I think it's hard to get a sense of how abnormal this experience is for Santiago he's not unprepared for this he's prepared for a sort of normal day fishing this is an abnormal day fishing to the point that when we come back to the shore at the end of the story like we're been told that essentially the Coast Guard and everybody's been looking at him for several days right like so he is beyond the pale of the known and that's important to remember but I think you didn't bring an extra you're gonna fish for your food but you didn't think he was gonna be out there for three days rolling onto a 1500 pound marlin you know for years and years this has been what he's done and never has he gotten up and caught a 1500 pound tuna and had to deal with this like we would use the language in our company like we don't solve for edge cases like you can't get up every morning and load your boat up with the things you would need just in case you catch the biggest fish in the world like you just have to be prepared for what the sort of average expectation yes and he is prepared it's not like Cheryl Strait going out to hike in wild where she's never laced up a pair of boots and her pack has 500 pounds worth of stuff in it you know like Santiago knows what he's doing and he's got the gear but just like no one goes out for what they think is a normal day expecting to catch a fish this big and then to be out there for three days and three nights and so it does have also that like mythic quality to it that when you hear about how big the fish is and how much it weighs and how hard it is to reel in and how long he's out there there is kind of a just a vibe to reading this that's like am I actually supposed to believe that Santiago caught this fish or are we doing something else here um I as you were talking I was remembering the a perfect storm oh yeah yeah it's a non-fiction about fisher people it's more about surviving a storm that's another great read on that but I think you know one thing I didn't think about too until you just said that it's reads like a survival story right this this book the difference being at any point he could cut the line at any point he could give up on the fish now we know sort of psycho emotionally he's he can't do it he even tells us he can't do it but part of what this this is a survival story of choice and of testing himself and it becomes something beyond the you know economic necessity because at some point he catches another marlin on the other line and he choose to let that one go even though it's probably more manageable he could land that and get that home and sort of make his nut for the month or whatever but this is about something other than normal human behavior this is outside the scope of just him getting through his days this is a trial of the soul and a trial of the imagination the trial a trial of will and so he is willfully he says I will gladly die in this pursuit but I'm going to try this thing so when we see unprepared he is unprepared of course but then that hardship becomes part of the the value of it right at the same time I don't I would just never stop barfing between the movements of the waves and the nausea this whole thing eating the raw fish the sunburn alone I you know they even talks about the skin cancer that's forming on this guy like it's really hard out there for a ginger like you an emotion six prone like me I think we probably the world's worst duo to land the 1500 pound marlin using only line and like dolphin fish yeah I'm just gonna either throwing myself into the sea or like no we ran out of water I'm going back home we can you turn into a slim gym you would just be a burnt crispy dried up husk of meat live to fish another day let's like we don't we don't need this my own stray thoughts are I've never seen a person more need of one of those doffle encounter things you could do at resorts do you think we have this story if he gets to like run around with like dolphins at get a hug from a manatee just kind of see you know kind of a different level of communing with nature and conservation it's so interesting to think about this I was thinking about overfishing and how that even this fish is mythic like it's within the bounds of the possible but I don't know if people know this but like you can't catch fish like this anymore because there's so much overfishing like in these days in Hemingway's days early fishing Leviathan still roamed the Caribbean where he could land these giant fish which just there's so much fishing commercial and sport and otherwise that this is actually a lost world but even in the moment it feels like a lost world like this is a mythic kind of beast and Leviathan that he's kept seeing it feels like it's out of time yes the market rate for marlin sword slash swordfish was just 30 cents a pound didn't seem like a whole lot because he's doing the math like okay if it's you know there's going to be a third of it that's like guts and scale yeah and that's sell that there's only like a thousand pounds there's like 300 bucks yeah three bucks a pound now yeah yeah 1950 300 bucks would be a lot of money 3000 it's because that's like 30 cents a 30 30 cents oh today can have a thousand pounds yeah yeah yeah so it's I get and I think that also says we're not talking about some with a lot of money and we get we get very sly hints that he is really subsistence fishing at this particular point yeah did Hemingway ruin Florida and my thought here is is the following is without the popularity of the old man in the sea as a I think unintentionally make sport fishing a thing that men do for fun and masculine proving of self what did this do to commercial fishing as like you know we read about Jurassic Park is like a bunch of people came paleontologists or like with the big Lebowski comes out and everyone is drinking white russians like these things can matter over time this is the history of Florida different without Hemingway himself and the old man in the sea specifically a great question but this is one of my straight thoughts that's where they go in the street this experience in this book is not a great ad for move to Florida but the Hemingway of it all might be I mean there's a Hemingway of this all a lot of tourism built up around Hemingway especially in Key West now all right let's do some quotes you pulled the number one quote on Goodreads Rebecca what is it it's not that weird this time it's every day is a new day it is better to be lucky but I would rather be exact than when luck comes you are ready and that did make me think is this where we got be ready when the luck happens which is the thing people say and also the title of Ina Garten's memoir I'm going back to our old pal the the unlucky dane the readiness is all there's special providence in the fall the sparrow the red readiness is all for Hamlet but the same idea fortune favors the prepared you know I think this has been around for a little bit we're also going to go I have some you have some we can ping back and forth I may not be as strong as I think but I know many tricks and I have resolution it's pretty good tattoo I have many tricks and I have revolutions could that would that be our literary quote it's a good one that I think that is I know many tricks that I have resolution is a good tattoo from this I also really liked he looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now but he could see the prisms in the dark water and the lion stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm the clouds were building up now for the trade winds and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water then blurring then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea I had that I'm glad you had this I was going to pull that out too it's just beautiful and yeah and they're really pretty it's pretty Rebecca I don't know what to say that's pretty yeah it is it's gorgeous no man is an island no man is alone like literally saying you're not alone and it is silly not to hope he thought besides I believe it is a sin so much Christian stuff again Catholics and like is very much in the culture that Santiago his name and he's participating in but Hemingway does not downplay it in fact he gives it specificity I have I must hold his pain where it is he thought mine does not matter I can control mine but his pain could drive him mad I was going to pull this up into the biography because people may know that Hemingway ended his life with a shotgun after a diagnosis we don't really know there's like a whole book called Hemingway's brain trying to figure out what led him to have the kind of mental health issues he was clearly at the end of his life his father committed suicide two of his siblings committed suicide he was diagnosed with a condition earlier where iron builds up in the brain which is a hereditary there's a thought that maybe this was passed along but I thought it was interesting here at the end of his life that the pain can drive you mad and if you can no longer control your pain or even think about controlling your pain that is something that can make you crazy to your detriment and it is the single distinguishing factor between him and the great fish whereas he can think about his pain he can say there is my pain I know what it is I can control it and here's what's going to happen whereas the fish does not have that same capability and that is why I think we're ultimately why does the fish win because of this right because of this the human ability to recognize pain to contain it to honor it to hold it but not let them drive you out of your mind except having his own life and what we know about pain what we know about mental there is a limit to that and Santiago was taken right up to it if this was a five this was a 1,501 pound marlin I think Santiago is dead it doesn't work it's right at the edges of his capacity that's right I also have I should not have gone so out so far out fish he said neither for you nor for me I'm sorry fish I would also encourage readers if they do pick this up to notice the farther Santiago gets from shore and the deeper into the struggle he gets the more he talks to himself aloud and the more the pronouns and things get messed up and he talks directly to the fish that's interesting there. Dimaggio I just wanted to get one Dimaggio thing in but I must think he thought because it is all I have left that in baseball I wonder how the great Dimaggio have liked the way I hit him in the brain talking about one the sharks he fended off it was no great thing he thought any man could do it but do you think my hands were as great a handicap as the bone spurs I cannot know he's fixated on Dimaggio has these burns bone spurs that kept him that was a hardship to overcome I think that's one of the reasons he identifies with Dimaggio is that he's got this it's known that he has this other ailment that he sort of lives with every day he's not a perfect specimen right he's not Hercules yeah these are got godlike bodies yeah he's human unovercoming the limitations of the physical body which I thought was cool I think this was to me the subtlest explanation of what expertise can afford you Santiago thinks he thought of how some men feared being out of sight of land in a small boat and knew and he knew they were right in the months of sudden and bad weather but now they were in hurricane months and when there are no hurricanes the weather of hurricane months is the best all year so it's not denying or or or being cavalier in the face of where the danger is but knowing where the danger is and knowing how to navigate it and going out and sailing in hurricane season knowing that well if there's not a hurricane it's going to be great if a hurricane comes great but like I actually am more afraid of non-hurricane months because it's much less predictable to avoid doubt at that point so there's there's that anything else you wanted to get here no I mean we could do this all day yeah for being 80 pages long there are so many wonderful lines I have my close read section for the office hours should I tease that or just save it let's just save it let's just save it it's about sharks I guess I'll say enough about that Rebecca is this for you yes why might this be for you yes it's 80 pages long it's for you yes yeah I think just do it and linger as you were saying yeah don't just because the sentences are short don't rush through it my husband crashed on the couch and like ended up taking one of the great epic naps as I was reading this and I so I was it's like when you're trapped under the dog or the baby like I was not gonna move anyway because I'm not gonna get up and make noise while a big much needed nap was happening but it was like all right might as well just dwell here with Hemingway and that ended up being such a gift like concoct that for yourself take the time I really struggled to come up with maybe not for you like things of this this short I mean unless there's really difficult subject matter I guess if you're an animal cruelty person maybe you know this is not a dog dies situation you know maybe there's something to that but it's it's pretty minor as these things go the immortal questions that aren't asked which of these is primary what is the good life what do I owe my neighbor how do I know what I know is this all there is how do you deal with the certainty of death what else might there be what's the deal with good and evil free will or no I mean it's kind of all of them and kind of none of them it's not one doesn't jump out to me yeah I mean there's he's doing this because it's the thing that he knows how to do in order to survive so that sort of feeds back to what is the good life yes there's a little dealing with the certainty of death here or with the possibility of death he's like he's facing down himself and real danger but there is a line where Santiago thinks to himself he's like he's talking to himself as you were saying you were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish and that's not free will stuff but it is fate stuff and I think that's if there's anything there maybe we go maybe we add an immortal question to like how do we relate how are we to make sense of our relationship to the natural world but that seems to be what Hemingway is really dealing with yeah I think is this all there is he is in a way Santiago is a kind of explorer in which he is testing the limits of the known both for himself and in us and the human right where is that limit and I kind of that's one way that's one way of seeing the lions on the shores of Africa being there is something to being in nature differently than humans are in nature that's inaccessible to us as humans but it's out there and how close to you get to it what danger lurks when you get there I think there's also something about what is the good life like one of the reasons that he chooses not to cut the line is this feels like a life's purpose to have a purpose this I think this idea of those all goes all the way back to Aristotle of happiness is getting what you want and keeping it but it's also of using your skills and strengths at the highest level right find that's what purpose looks like sometimes at work we call that sharp tools and interesting problems this is the sharpest tool and interesting problems that songs you know it's going to test him and he's going to find out what he can do by coming up exactly to the edge of what he can do right you only find your limit when you touch it yeah so that's a what is a good life to me yeah that's I think that's right on are we sure this is my art in writing I mean despite Hemingway's insistent that that it wasn't about anything the whole get up every morning and get out there in the boat and do the thing and see what happens sure sounds like a pep talk for a writer just get up and do it every day and sooner or later you'll catch the fish I'm and I'm gonna go with yes yeah the the quiet accumulation of mastery of many many repetitions I do not think Hemingway would be a fan of hacks of life hacks I don't think that's where Hemingway would be uh suggesting that valor and glory lies Hemingway would be friction maxing yeah right which could you get most of the gist from watching a v signal adaptation there have been many attempts but none of them have become the signal adaptation which I think says something like many have tried no one has succeeded you have a note here that Hemingway hated the Spencer Tracy version I haven't seen any of these I don't feel any desire to watch an adaptation of this it really feels to me like a book doing things that books can do which is not always sentences doing thing that only sentence yes like this is sentence work here Rebecca let's let's keep it to the sentence I agree into our next question then would we want it as a movie a musical a tv series or something with the Muppets I I didn't want any of them but I thought a lot about a book that we both loved a few years ago called Heartbreak by Florence Williams where part of the audiobook is excerpts from the an audio journal that she kept while she was out in the wild on camping trips and like canoeing through the Grand Canyon and reflecting on a recent end of a relationship and I kind of was like well if we had to if we have to do anything a heartbreak style like audio journal from Santiago is the only thing I might be interested in but I think this is a pretty perfect work of literature yeah I think a really good audiobook could be cool maybe maybe one of those cases where one of those enhanced audiobooks you get a little waves and maybe you get some soundscape and it could be cool I don't know Nick Offerman and let's do it yeah I didn't I need to spend some more time thinking about audiobook narrators here but that's a pretty interesting one all right we've got a long section of trivia adaptations rumors and quotes let's let's bolt through these Rebecca well if you're reading this along and you're like how deep is a fathom I have to google it a fathom is six feet or two yards so Santiago's deepest bait is at 25 fathoms that's 50 yards and his line can go out to 300 fathoms which is 600 yards that's 1800 feet so a third of a mile that's that's so much reeling in for a 1500 pound fish you've got the water and your cramped hand and a marlin fighting for its life on the other side that's so much line to reel in I think maybe my favorite trivia related to Hemingway not specific to this book is that he was discovered by Maxwell Perkins you name checked him earlier in the episode Perkins was the same editor at Scribner who published Fitzgerald Marjorie Kinnon Rawlings who wrote the yearling and Thomas Wolfe so like just a hell of a run and probably beat only by in contemporary publishing Sonny Mehta who died a couple of years ago but was the random house editor who did Tony Morrison and Salman Roushdi and those are just a couple like just a huge long list for Sonny Mehta but the only two legendary editors that I can name off the top of my head and the book is dedicated to Charlie Scribner and Max Perkins um let's see I'll google a couple of mine I talked about him losing a half decade of writing in depression this is something we cooked up when we did an old series we used to do called annotated about this was about Ulysses but Sylvia Beach who owned Shakespeare and Company in Paris and who was the French publisher of Ulysses was looking for ways to get it into the US it was banned in the US and one day she was sitting around basically brainstorming with some other people and this young guy in the back of the store pipes up like I know a guy in Detroit that commutes from Canada Detroit every day from work I bet he could get some copies in and that young man was Ernest Hemingway so he was um instrumental in getting the and if this sounds like a Hemingway thing to do it's to smuggle Ulysses 100 to the US across a boat he also has maybe the greatest narrated scene of someone trying to get from one country to another in the form of a boat at the end of farewell to arms no spoilers lots of speculation about the suicide I'd say there just also a guy you know kind of accident prone but he also puts himself into be places where he gets an accident he almost died twice in plane crashes he almost lost his leg in world war one there's some other injuries as well but my favorite one is he once gave himself a concussion by pulling off a light fixture off the ceiling that he thought was the pull chain for a toilet yeah doc Brown himself you know he almost invented the flux uh flux capacitor by when he was taking a dump one night and didn't know how to operate the toilet so funny and the largest collection of his notes and papers are at the JFK library in Boston which is kind of a strange place off you know at first look for Hemingway stuff to end up Hemingway and JFK never knew each other but they did have great admiration for each other and it turns out that when he was writing profiles in courage John F. Kennedy wrote to Hemingway to ask permission to use Hemingway's definition of courage which is grace under pressure which also not for nothing a great subtitle for the old man unbelievable I don't think I remember that that idea of grace under pressure I knew that I definition of courage I didn't know was Hemingway also another good tattoo for those out there that reminds me of another one that Hemingway and his then wife Martha were living in Cuba when the revolution was beginning to happen they got some rumblings of things were going to happen there so they they busted tail and left a bunch of their possessions including all of Hemingway's books and some notes and manuscripts and I believe those are either gone or salted away kind of like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Larght some warehouse in Cuba has Hemingway stuff that might be a gold mine for some point. Yeah they're off with wherever the paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are. Yes yeah yeah I think that's it for now I've got a lot of those would you like to go to Hot Takes or whatever. Sure Hemingway would be a real PR liability for a publisher today like the Hemingway of it all and that would be such a loss like my hot take here is maybe it was better when we knew less about the people that were making the great books or we were more willing to let them be weird and bad and complicated and I don't know how to square that with my 2026 social and political sensibilities about like I don't want anybody to be mistreated I don't want women to experience the things that they experienced in relationships with Hemingway I also want us to have books like this and we're not going to do can we separate the art from the artist kind of thing but like I just spent so much time being grateful that I have this book to read and thinking about how an author living and existing the way that Hemingway did in the social world today would not be allowed the kind of spotlight and the kind of like social acceptance that Hemingway was for better and for worse but I just had to say something about like it's so it is so tingly and complex we're not going to solve it it is not without a trade-off to have a certain kind of expectation of ideology and behavior from artists and it actually makes me think of a Hemingway quote I believe I'm doing this off the dome so I'm sorry if this is wrong he once said Shakespeare is worth any number of old ladies meaning I don't care if people get pissed off or worried because the art matters more than the sensibilities of a bunch of pearl clutches I guess that would be useful for Hemingway to say but I think I think there's something about art which is the things that last the things that resonate or the things that plum previously unplumbed depths and one factor of that might be you need to transgress in some way what are we willing to let people who are exploring in any number of ways it could be scientific research it could be all kinds of things what depths are we willing to let them plum that are have been unplumbed what transgressions are we willing to allow them that may cross the barrier of what we believe is acceptable warrantable laudable or even legal behavior I don't know the answer but I feel similarly to you which is it is not easy and to circumstrive what people can think and feel and do means some things that you might want to be thought some country you might want to be discovered will go undiscovered yeah because of that circumscription my hot take is if you're going to write a novel about a thing go do that thing love that thing revel in that thing write about things that are not you but that you have fallen love with or are fascinated by that's my hot take yeah read a likes recommendation books inspired by an other artist experience that may scratch the same itch Rebecca what do you have I mean Hemingway is really the only true read alike for Hemingway but as I thought about this I think James Salter is a salt her yeah very much in the shadow yeah one of my favorites but I know a large catalog of work but solo faces about rock climbers and the hunters about is world war one pilots just there's a rugged old school masculinity to Salter as well hunter is a great pull I think that's one and I think it it's related in a lot of ways like a young man in a plane a young man in the sky is maybe a good way of thinking about hunter yeah that's right yeah and it's like a more refined like high literary version but I mean people are not reading James Salter enough so if the thing I achieve here is five people listening to this go pick up a James Salter novel that'll be a huge win for me more contemporary stuff we both really like Peter Heller's adventure novels that's true like usually it's dudes versus nature in some kind of way they're a little more on the thriller side but like interesting and then I spent a ton of time on this reading thinking about a marriage at sea by Sophie Elmhurst out on a boat yeah which came out last year yeah true story about a married couple stranded in the ocean after their boat sank and they're out there for like months just in a tiny lifeboat running out of food figuring out how to capture sea turtles with their bare hands trying not to kill each other and keep their morale up like a great read harrowing stuff kind of depends on what you're looking for from a read alike mine is something that Hemingway himself recommended it's a memoir called West by Night by Beryl Markham who was a pilot and she became a horse trainer and a very sort of notable person I think in 1942 as a publication date this is Hemingway's own review she has written so well and marvelously well that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen but she can write rings around all of us who concerns those writers it really is a bloody wonderful the hell if I got that review from Hemingway I think I would dissipate into Adams of you just hang it up that day like we're done we're done I will say is quite good I would I would love to know if there's a I can look this up if there is a great audiobook version of this now an underrated gem of a book you've recommended that to me in the past and I still haven't gotten to it but I think I think it's a good zero to well read contender yeah cocktail party crib sheet three to five takeaways Rebecca what do we have you can do anything with discipline perseverance and a little community support and really it's that humans are made of tougher stuff than we give ourselves credit for and Hemingway says this or Santiago says it but man is not made for defeat a man can be destroyed but not defeated and it really is just get up and get back in the damn boat and do the thing yeah mine is quite simple here right Hemingway's writing is not what you think it is it just it just isn't a final beat or zero the well read score each one gets a score of one to ten with ten being the highest are five vectors of evaluation are historical importance readability current relevance of central questions book nerd read cred and oh damn factor as you might have listeners you might have heard us at the beginning it is not the book that made Hemingway but is the book that preserved Hemingway as a I think it's not not impossible to say that so again it's 10 is not on the board I don't know that it's the is it the most important of Hemingway's books I really struggled with this hard I'm gonna go position to write this without Sun also rises or farewell the arms or the early short story so I don't think it can be those but maybe it but it does feel like a real capstone to the Hemingway yeah I think eight eight and a half yeah somewhere in there readability approaches 10 if not a 10 I think it's a 10 like it's what would make it more readable I mean look it is is as readable as the most commercial of commercial fiction like page turners is that a 10 if we're grading on a curve for the kind of book we're going to talk about it's a 10 but I think if we're actually looking in the full range of what people might pick up to read it's a nine all right fine yeah current relevance of central questions that would imply I know exactly what the questions are but let's assume that for a moment we have some sense yes it feels relevant it feels very just it feels relevant in the way that like myths and tall like they are relevant yeah I think the infinity symbol is the answer to this question yeah it's like can we do a five slash 10 I don't know enough there's there like the square root of negative two isn't one of those like an impossible number we need Douglas Adams to show up and yes a number for this yeah yeah I think we just invented a new rating with the two of the square root of right negative two for the current relevance of central question it's sort of it is above and a beyond and around that yeah book nerd read cred there's part of me that's like this isn't low but the on the other hand I think it's sort of gone around the horseshoe theory of like it's gone around the bend where so many people know about it and think it's they know what it is that they don't actually pick it up like what is this book about so I'm not sure about yeah I'm gonna go with an eight here for that reason but and as always like if you have picked up a book that's commonly assigned in English classes but you have picked it up after your schooling ended on your own you get a higher score oh damn factor again I do not want to fall prey to the thing that people fall prey to and think this is simple and easy and it's just sort of there it is difficult to rate it at the same level as like a vine lander a Shakespeare but I think if you look at it from a certain angle it's right there just from the other it's like a mirror version it's other side of the coin of those kinds the oh damn for me was in how many times it was not the book I was expecting it to be yeah so I'm going with a nine yeah pretty high score here for Hemingway who's surprised not I'm not as surprised I'm so I didn't know what your own experience would be reading it I'm so glad that I loved it it resonated and had some juice for you okay that brings us to the end of our show you can follow us on socials at zero to well read podcast use an email zero to well read at book riot calm you can go to patreon.com slash zero to well read for our detailed show notes our free newsletter and membership options one of which includes the office hours we are about to record which we're going to do some close reading of a little section of old man in the sea thanks so much to thrift books for sponsoring this season of zero to well read and Rebecca what number what what are we proud to be we are proud to be a member of the airwave podcast network yes we are thank you Rebecca thanks everybody we'll talk to you next see you all next time