This is Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952) a short novel of an old, down-on-his luck Cuban fisherman twinned with the monstrous fish at the end of his line, battling him for three days.
But his left hand had always been a traitor and would not do what he called on it to do and he did not trust it. [...] An aeroplane passed overhead on its course to Miami and he watched its shadow scaring up the schools of flying fish. [...] I would like to fly very slowly at two hundred fathoms high and see the fish from above. [69-70]
At the exact moment that the fish took the hook and dived, the line racing through his hands, burning cuts into his palms, the doors slammed shut at Oxford Circus, shocking me on my commute. The old man's struggle is lengthy: the line, his back and hands, a bottle of water, some strips of fish for sustenance, endurance, a direct dialogue with the fish. It's appealingly simple, poetic, of course. The comparison to modern Caribbean game fishing is jarring.
'Fish,' the old man said. 'Fish you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?' [...] You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who. [91-92]
Of his style and symbolism Hemingway said:
"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in [...] That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better [...] I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."
But despite that, there's an explicit and occasionally heavy-handed Passion metaphor which divided critics at the time, mostly on the grounds that his realism was complicated or diluted. (And anyone interested in style and realism should read James Wood's How Fiction Works, which is itself brilliant and a bit controversial.)
This particular book is the 1958 Jonathan Cape hardback, and its gorgeous cover is a bit torn and tatty, like the old man's neck and shirt. The uncredited artist has taken a bit of licence with the fish, fattening and colouring it up, but what a cover though.
It was owned and studied by my mum at school or college in Melbourne. On the page facing the endpaper inside, there's a price, 9/6, and she had careful pencilled "Merle Murray". Beneath that, in a neatly spaced list, she's written "Theme, Setting, Personalities, Style." On page 71 I found a beige animal hair that must have come from Woosel the cat.
She has underlined sections on the physical effort, the passage of time, the arrival of the sharks, the physicality of the man and fish, the geography, and his dialogue with his adversary. There's the occasional note, "second evening", "barbed fishing spear" glossing the word gaff. I wonder what she thought of the book.
I remember reading this as a child and being transfixed by the old man's stakhanovite suffering. Having eventually prevailed over the fish, it seems inevitable that he should lose it to the sharks on the long slog back into Havana.
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