I'm going to wait until tomorrow to post some of my thoughts, but I thought I'd comment on this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
To me, it's way he fished that blew the story. There was no real tension. There was no real struggle. It was just not well written.
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I have to think we need to give Hemingway (who loved deep sea fishing and spent a lot of time in Cuba and Key West) the credit for knowing the means and methods of deep sea fishing by rich and poor in the Caribbean in the early 50s. He was
there; he didn't just make it up. And he was very specific about how Santiago fished that marlin which adds to the verisimilitude.
And, the story is
all tension,
all struggle. A specious objection to how the protagonist fished doesn't negate that. And, seriously? I'm not saying that a Nobel is a guarantee of good writing, but Hemingway is one of the major prose stylists of the 20th century. Not liking his style is a different matter.