[issybird]

I delayed a bit on posting to see if anyone else shared my reaction and then was busy. But I'm caught up now and see no one's weighed in yet.

What struck me most was that this is a sustained and quite powerful Christian allegory, although somewhat flawed. From the start, there's a fisherman named Santiago. James, son of Zebedee, was one of the fishermen called by Christ to be an apostle and the first to be martyred. And then Manolin, a diminutive of Manuel/Emmanuel, was the source of abiding love and endless succor.

The language of the book is replete with religious symbolism, affirmations of faith and hope and love, references to relics, Christ as a fisher of men and fish as a symbol of Christianity, the number of people to be fed by the marlin, the vow of a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre, Our Lady of Charity, thus invoking the pilgrimage of St. James, and I could go on. Hemingway converted to Catholicism when he married his second wife and while it's dubious he was ever a practicing Catholic, the motifs of the religion pervade several of his novels.

The depth provided by this allegory in conjunction with the evocations of the emotions experienced by Santiago and the heart-pounding physicality of the catch made this unputdownable for me. I read this decades ago when it was clearly over my head; it's on my ten best list for this year.

I did think Hemingway's metaphors got a bit confused toward the end, when Santiago is more of a Christ figure, carrying his mast like a cross to his shack and then lying as if crucified, hands with their stigmata palms up. Ultimately, I'm not sure what Hemingway was driving at with this shift unless I read it wrong from the start, although the names seem pretty indicative to me.

There is an unintended symmetry between Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises and his last in his lifetime, The Old Man. A significant portion of Sun was set along the ancient pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela, where St. James's body is supposed to have ended up after floating from Israel where he was martyred, and the names of the protagonists in both books, Jake Barnes and Santiago, are variants of James.