(Photo Courtesy of Charles Scribner's Sons)
I stroll into the bookstore. It is dark. I am intrigued. I pick up a book, and it is dusty, worn, misused; covered and tattered by the years and years that this obscure piece of literature has clearly been sitting unknown on the shelves of this store. It is “The Old Man and the Sea.” The author is Ernest Hemingway. Thus, I began.
You may think the short, choppy sentences of this lede are displeasing to the reader’s internal narrative. You would be correct. But, hey, how could you go wrong mimicking the style of Hemingway, one of America’s great writers? There’s a whole contest dedicated to copying this dude. They call it the “Bad Hemingway Contest,” which still leaves the question to be answered: Is there good Hemingway?
Aside from Hemingway’s terse prose, the book itself left me with many questions. The most important: when most people enter their golden years and can no longer complete their jobs, they don’t go on a three-day long, misguided quest for a fish that’s too big to take back to shore. You haven’t caught anything in 84 days, dude. Just go get a condo in Florida and play golf in tacky pastel polo shirts like a normal person.
I’m also more than a little concerned about the harmful male stereotypes perpetuated by the old man spending three days nearly killing himself to catch this fish in order to protect his pride.
On top of the ridiculousness of the task that forms the core conflict of the book is the awkward friendship/mentorship between the old man and the boy (if Hemingway can’t bother to use their names, neither can I). The old man “teaches the boy to fish” while the boy cares for him, making sure he eats and sleeps. Let me just say, Mr. Hemingway, that I have read Plato’s "Symposium." I know what you’re up to and, quite frankly, I’m disgusted.
Upon further research, I learned that not only is this epic of frustrated emotion and rotten fish held up as one of the greatest works of American literature, but it won a goddamn Pulitzer Prize. This shocked me, as I hadn’t yet been alerted that the awards had created a category for repressed emotion and misplaced machismo. With this in mind, make sure to look out for my soon-to-be-released, Nobel Prize-deserving masterpiece, “Elderly Man Represses Emotion, Urinates Off Side of Boat and Eats Fish Bait for Three Days,” on shelves this spring!
Reach the reporter at ezentner@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @emilymzentner
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