Goldster Book Club will see in the New Year with conversation about fishing, strength, wisdom and friendship.
12.00 noon UK Time
Goldster Book Club
The Old Man and the Sea is the classic by Ernest Hemingway who tells the story of Santiago, an elderly Cuban fisherman with little but hope to sustain him through a punishing life. Published in 1952, it was Hemingway’s last substantive work after novels that recast modern literature such as A Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) together with groundbreaking war reporting from the Spanish Civil War and the Normandy Invasion. Santiago had gone eighty-four days without catching a fish and is seen by his colleagues as salao – so unlucky that his young apprentice leaves him to work on a luckier boat. Santiago is filled with hope that his unlucky streak is at an end and sets off into the Straits of Florida where he hooks a Marlin. However, the fish is so big that he cannot bring it on board and has to lash it to the side of his boat where, on his journey back, it is eaten by sharks.
The Old Man and Sea, reinvigorated Hemingway’s faltering reputation such that in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.’
With this beautiful slim story, Goldster Book Club will see in the New Year with conversation about fishing, strength, wisdom and friendship.
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