This is going to be a short review for a short book. Unfortunately it isn’t short enough. Not my review. The book. I wanted to love this. I didn’t. To start, The Old Man and the Sea is boring!
I’ll start this review by sharing perhaps the best review of a book I’ve ever read.
Pretty much sums up my feelings entirely.
I rated this 2 stars because I’m kind and the writing itself was pretty good. It is Hemingway after all.
My boss is always telling me to write more like Hemingway. By this he means short and sweet. Get to the point. The trouble is, with The Old Man and the Sea it’s not short enough and it’s waaaay too sweet. The writing is flowery and Hemingway wafts on and on about the old man and the fish he follows.
It’s like one of those paintings, that are worth a lot of money (whatever someone’s willing to pay, right?) and you stand there thinking:
“Why? Why is this abstract painting worth so much? What is there that I’m not seeing?”
Throughout this book I asked myself over and over what it was that I wasn’t seeing. I might be a little biased on the subject matter as a vegan but this isn’t supposed to be about some fish, it’s supposed to be a profound journey of faith. The problem was, it wasn’t profound at all.
It was painful.
My head was screaming “Just cut the goddamn line already!”.
But I will give Hemingway another shot, cause I’m kind like that.
In the words of Rory Gilmore:
Give the painful Earnest Hemingway another chance. Yes, I promise.
