My Favourite Book: The Old Man and the Sea

There’s something about The Old Man and the Sea that that makes me make an annual pilgrimage to its pages. It’s the first book I read each year, the standard to challenge every book I read afterwards. It’s become a quiet ritual that sets the bar for all that follow, even if I can’t quite explain why. It maybe its solitude, or to Santiago, the old fisherman, out there on the ocean alone with his thoughts and his fish. It’s certainly not a life I could live and not a feat I could match but it is one I admire.

Ernest Hemingway’s story is, on the surface at least, a simple one, just an old, experienced, fisherman, a boat and a marlin but it holds such weight in its words. There’s a respect in the writing, mostly toward the creature Santiago is trying to catch. I’ve never liked the hunting side of it, the struggle for survival feels cruel, but the way Hemingway tells it is blunt and gory but it’s not so much cruelty, it’s necessity and a lot of honour. That sticks with me.

I first read the book at school, it didn’t mean much to me, just something we had to read but years later, when audiobooks started to become a thing, I found it again. This time narrated by Donald Sutherland. His voice gave it a depth, as though that World was around me through my cheap headphones. A few years ago my daughter bought me the paperback, and that sealed it. It became my book. A tradition.

Released in 1952 it quickly became one of Hemingway’s most celebrated works. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953, and many believe it was a key factor in Hemingway being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Hemingway felt a strong connection to it too. In a letter, he wrote:

“I know that it is the best I can write ever for all of my life.”

Reading, for me, has always been about escape. It’s a doorway into a slightly different world, sometimes simpler, or at least different enough to make you breathe a little easier and take stock of the goings on in life. This book resonates, Santiago’s story is one of endurance, failure, and triumph all wrapped into one. There’s no tidy ending. He wins, and he loses. He drinks coffee on a bed covered in newspapers and sleeps thinking of Lions and probably his beloved baseball but in that quietness something feels real. In the bay is his what could’ve been, his record breaker, his fame, his fortune and ultimately it all means nothing.

I’d recommend The Old Man and the Sea to anyone, even just the once. It won’t yell drama at you or leave you panting with twists and turns, it’s a man in a boat talking to his hand that doesn’t work so well and a fish for the most part but it will sit with you, it will linger. I think sometimes that’s all a good book needs to do.