The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

23:26To use a phrase we've been using recently, it's escaped containment, even of its own text. And that matters at the same time as well. And I think it also solidifies, even though its variations on it's quite different in some regards to the spare, stripped down prose of especially something like Hell's Like White Elephants, which is, I think the most often taught of the short stories. But it is like that, but it's also different. There are quite long sentences here, but there's not very much punctuation. Omission is the principal mode that Hemingway is known for, like say less. Weirdly, Gertrude Stein got there first, and omit needless words is actually one of her dictums.

24:10But very much in this post-World War I, as I believe Henry James says, World War I used all the words. And so there was finding some other way to convey emotion, humanist interiority and experience. And this is the crowning jewel of Hemingway's career. And I think probably the crowning jewel of that mode of style. And it's really hard to go back and for stylists, right, to go back and find someone who really moved the needle on style, even if they weren't the only person. it's like Joyce and Faulkner and Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf and then later Morrison who was also looking at Faulkner like you we don't get many is what I'm trying to say we don't get many of these it was before and after and the sentences were altered because of this person it's deceptively

24:59Jeff:simple you know like because the language is so straightforward because the sentences are uncomplicated when I read Hemingway the for the first time I think it was my freshman year of high school. And it wasn't Old Man of the Sea. But the teacher, my teacher contrasted it with The Great Gatsby. We read them right up against each other. And I remember a writing assignment after that, that was then take either the style of Fitzgerald or Hemingway and write a story like, here's the topic, but you pick which style you're going to mimic. And I took Hemingway, because I took Fitzgerald, because I was like, well, we can be flowery, like I can purple up some prose and show that I demonstrate that I, you know, know what Fitzgerald was doing.

25:39Jeff:But a lot of people I remember took Hemingway and struggled through it. Yeah, it's not as easy as it looks. Because it's actually not easy to convey as much as Hemingway conveys with as few words as he manages to do it. It's really remarkable. Like, there are 350-page full-length novels about these same ideas that don't do it nearly as well as Hemingway does it in 80 pages. Yeah. All right. Let's get into a little Hemingway backstory. story. We could do a mini-series on Hemingway, and so much is written about Hemingway and writing about writing about Hemingway, but let's just put some of the basic pieces.

26:13Born in Oak Park, Illinois, his dad was a doctor, his mom was a musician, forced him to play the cello. I didn't remember that. I was doing my Hemingway research, and he played the cello. I hope he was better than I was. I was generally acknowledged to be the world's worst cello player in middle school. and then very, you know, he did well in English class. He did not go to college. So this is something to know. I'm going to put this right here. None of the war hunting, drinking, fishing was a put on. Like he did all of this stuff and did it early. He went to war shortly after war broke out. But his first experience out of high school was he was a cover recorder for the Kansas City Star.

26:49Spent just, I think, six or nine months only there. But it was super influential for him because the writing style, the telling the story, You literally don't have space to do a lot. And finding the heart of the story and conveying it simply and evocatively was the order of the day. And then he goes to war. He was rejected from serving in the U.S. Army during World War I because of eyesight. And so he's like, he could have got out of it, Rebecca, but he didn't. He volunteered for the Italian Red Cross, essentially, and drove an ambulance. He wasn't there too long. I think maybe less than a few months when he was caught in action and nearly had his leg blown off.

27:30Spent six months in an army hospital, basically trying to do hand signals to Italian doctors about whether or not he's going to lose his leg and was forever altered by that experience. He won, I don't remember the exact name of the medal, but whatever the Italian Medal of Freedom was, he got one of those at the same time. And then sort of comes back and he's 18, 19, right? He's very young at this point and comes back and does some more writing and then starts to write short stories. And then, you know, goes to Paris. He gets married to Hadley. I think it's so interesting to know he was so connected to Despassos and other people.

28:03Like, go to Paris. Then he leaves Paris to move to Key West. My remembrance of it was that he was a much older man when he moved to Key West. He was only like 28. He was like 29. It's like 1928, 29.

28:17Jeff:I mean, this is like one of the things that I was marveling at with Fitzgerald, too, when we did Great Gatsby. It's like he was so young when he was writing about these big issues of life, the universe and everything. And this is, I think, the origin of the like Hemingway has almost like Ron Swanson type character. Yes, definitely. Yes. Like whiskey drinking with Hemingway, it was rum, but like drinking stoic, doodly dude, like man of few words, but I will be out there doing the thing. And that mythology is both grounded in reality and also just exceeds who the man was at this point in every possible direction.

29:01He went through, I mean, in the decade before Old Man in the Scene, he went through a fairly heavy fallow period, wrote a couple of things that weren't regarded very well. And he went through a fairly serious bout of depression right after World War II. He spent a lot of time in World War II doing journalism. He went to the Spanish Civil War, reported from the front lines, won another award from the U.S. Army for basically valor and war reportage. But then his friends started dying, and Maxwell Perkins, to whom Old Man C is co-dedicated, dies, like an editor of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and an underrated—well, there's a movie made about Maxwell Perkins, so he can't really be underrated as editors go.

29:39but other people were dying. Dos Passos was dying. His friends were dying. He was depressed, and he didn't know if his life had amounted to much. He didn't know if he was ever going to write anything great again. And so I think I want to highlight to undercut the stoicness, much like Parks and Rec tries to undercut this Ron Swanson-ness of it, where he actually does like puzzles, right? He actually does like some of these things that the facade doesn't comport with the facade. I think that's very much in the Hemingway vein where he was a loner, but he wanted to connect. He was voluble and gruff.

30:12Jeff:Yes. But he was also introverted and thoughtful and complicated, to be sure, at the same time. And this was the first time I had touched the old man in the sea since high school. And I was surprised by the depth of feeling that is conveyed. Because I'm also susceptible to the mythology of Hemingway and the like, that man of few words, still waters run deep kind of thing that he's portrayed as like the writing is so sharp and almost clinical that it's easy to portray him as having been like dry or unfeeling. are cold. And it's clear that there's like real sincere depth of feeling from this person about all sorts of things like coming out of multiple wars coming out of probably what would have been thought of as PTSD today from nearly having your leg blown off and then watching all of your friends die.

31:08Jeff:Of course, he's depressed. But if you're if we're talking about a writer who dealt with significant depression, we are by definition then talking about a writer who was dealing with serious, deep, like abundant emotion. And just because the writing is quiet does not mean that it lacks feeling. And that was how powerful the feeling is. And this was really fun to see. And not only doesn't foreclose it, I actually think the common understanding is bass-ackwards in this regard, which is the leanness of the writing is not really about denying feeling or emotion, but honoring and channeling what writing can do to surface it by direct description with subtly and nuance.

31:50You know, people are feeling beings. And if you evoke rather than Claire, you can harness some other kind of reaction. And this is not just me. I mean, he said things to this effect, like you may have heard of this iceberg theory, right? He articulated it in 1964 in Death in the Afternoon, which came a lot later. this is direct quotation here. If a writer of prose knows enough of what he's writing about, he may omit things he knows. And the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due only to one eighth of it being above water.

32:27A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow things in his writing. this continues on, you could admit anything if you knew that you admitted it and you were omitted the part that would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood. And I think that part is important where he wants to get you to feel something kind of like a magic trick where you're not sure how it's working. And he believed, and I think I agree with this, Rebecca, this is something you and I have talked about recently of like, if you can do the thing by saying less of like, look at that thing and look at the thing I'm doing, that is more powerful than saying it directly or like having being able to point with your fingers like, this is the moment where I started feeling that thing.

33:09We're sort of drawn out of you and it emerges and you don't know the source of it. That feels transcendent. I don't know another word for it.

33:18Jeff:It puts me in mind of our shared favorite book from last year, Audition by Katie Kitamura. Yes, yes. And the general vibe of reading Katie Kitamura, which is that, that it's very spare, but very rich because it evokes and draws you to your own feelings rather than to here is what the character is feeling and let me tell you all of the things. But that the sureness of Hemingway, like the confidence of the writing that I can say this in so few words and it will convey can only come from a place of also deep expertise and familiarity. He knows what it's like to be the guy in the boat. And that is irreplaceable and essential to get to the kind of writing that he's doing here.

34:00He's extraordinarily interested. And I have this down to what it's about here in a minute, maybe there's a good transition. He's extraordinarily interested and was from, as far as I know, really as early as Sun Also Rises, he was interested in mastery and expertise and what that allowed. Like one of the reasons he so was fascinated by the matador was the economy of movement. And they called the line is the purity of the line of the matador, right? were doing as much as they could with as little, but still could kill the bull and do it with style and flair. And people wouldn't really understand, but also they would understand the level of expertise that goes to it.

34:34And Ciantago is a kind of matador is interesting, right? And why the animal is the antagonist or the thing on the other end of the purity of that line. This one's a quite literal line. But it's about how well do you know that thing so that you're only making subtle adjustments, that you know when to be still, you know when to act, you know when to wait. You can read the signs for the long experience and expertise and knowledge that it doesn't even look like you're working. And then, of course, that's about art and writing and everything that's going on at the same time.

35:04Jeff:In addition to mastery of writing and developing that art, Hemingway was an accomplished angler. In the summer of 1935 in Bimini, he was the first person to bring in a bluefin tuna that was unscathed by sharks using a technique that he pioneered. And so by the time then a year later that he's writing that letter to the friend trying to explain the appeal of this kind of fishing, he's done this. He knows how to do it. And 15 years later, he picks up the story again, and starts to craft Santiago around things that he knew experientially like there are moments in the book where Santiago like the fish is on the line, and it's a heavy rope.

35:42Jeff:and he's turning. He's constantly turning and putting the rope over one shoulder and like leaning into it and then switching sides and putting the rope over the other shoulder. And you can picture Hemingway out in the ocean in a skiff with a huge fish on the line doing the same thing because he did it. And like that sort of embodied knowledge of what a character is feeling is a thing that is really hard to fake. And Hemingway's not faking it. And I think the fact that it's so authentic is one of the things that makes this really compelling and make it so sticky for readers. Yeah, so what's it all about?

36:16So big ideas and reading experience. Like you have here, it's epic and harrowing, and yet it's a dude on a boat, right? Yeah, but it's man versus nature. You have later, what are the great fishing novels? I was thinking about dude on a boat story, so we're talking Castaway. What that Robert Redford one, I don't remember what that was called, where it's just on a boat, Life of Pi, Joan and the Whale. Like, dude on a boat is a really interesting stuff. It is epic stuff.

36:39Jeff:Like, you know, in your high school reading taxonomy, this is both man versus nature and man versus himself, because he's just out there in the boat alone and the fish is out there in the sea. And it's about persistence and perseverance and a whole ton of like good old fashioned Catholic symbolism. even though Hemingway insisted and told a historian named Bernard Berenson that there isn't any symbolism. He said, the sea is the sea, the old man is the old man, the boy is the boy, and the fish is the fish. The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse. Sometimes writers say this. Recently, we talked about Andy Weir saying this about Project Hail Mary, like this insistence that there's not any symbolism, which maybe it didn't feel that way, but this is going like back to the iceberg, it's going on below the surface in Hemingway, and those unconscious things bubble up into the writing.

37:33Can I try out something on you, Rebecca? Because I was thinking about the symbol. There's a way of reading this that is the sea is the sea. And I think that's one reason it becomes so popular. It's a riveting yarn on its surface level, if you don't get any below the waves at all. I think a very simplistic idea of symbolism as being the mechanism by which a story accesses ideas that aren't explicitly articulated is a hindrance to people thinking about what a text can mean. So maybe there's not symbolism in a direct way you didn't intend it, but there are things that are represented and things that are included and excluded in this book that connect to ideas that are not directly overtly topics of the book.

38:12If you want to call that symbolism, great. But if you don't, that's okay too. But the story is also about more than other things than fish and boys and seas. It just is. I will not entertain any other way of thinking about this.

38:24Jeff:It's right. And it's helpful. And I think that helps us get outside of the ninth grade English class reading of what does the fish symbolize? What does the fish symbolize? Right. Yeah. What does the green light at the end of Daisy's dock mean? But there's unconscious stuff that's in Hemingway. There's unconscious stuff in every writer that shows up in the text. And this is also a thing that we hear writers say a lot, that they're surprised sometimes by the things that readers see. Because, of course, readers are bringing themselves to the books as well. But just the biggest questions about life, like how do we do a really hard thing?

39:02Jeff:But also can be read, as you're saying, on the surface level of what would an old man out in a boat by himself have to do to bring in a 1 ,500-pound fish? And how long would that take? And what would it be like over the course of three days and three nights? And it's like, it is harrowing. But because Hemingway has this economy of language, and like, my note is this is what we talk about when we talk about economy of language that you can say a lot with very little. It also feels really measured and almost meditative. There's repetition and what the old man has to do. and Hemingway is just making us sit there with Santiago, making us sit there in the boat, sit there with the struggle.

39:44Jeff:And I think that combination of the repetition and the just sitting in it is what makes the story so emotionally powerful. You cannot help but feel in yourself what it would be like to be there. Yeah. The away from the things of man is really on display and how stripped out, if you strip away some of those other things, then what emerges, I think, is interesting. That goes back to the iceberg theory as well. You strip away the things you don't need. Then what you're left with is even more burnished, even more apparent, even more eminent in what you're trying to do here. I guess you have rugged manly man here in all caps, which I think is a good shorthand for a caricature version of Hemingway.

40:24I don't find that to be the case here. Clearly, we get a whole backstory about a days-long arm wrestling match, which is clearly some masculine shit, as you say. but it's not just that. And if anything, that is a, I don't know if a canard is the right thing, but it can be a distraction even for the character themselves.

40:42Jeff:I think this was my first real adult revisiting of Hemingway. And I was expecting more of that, like rugged manly man, overtly masculine stuff, given the sort of Hemingway of it all and the way that he's talked about in pop culture. I was really pleasantly surprised by how powerful his depictions of nature and Santiago's relationship to nature is. I'm a person who spends a lot of time looking at a tree and reading Mary Oliver poetry. And so I don't map on to what we might think of as a stereotypical Hemingway fan. But I think that's just because our stereotypes about Hemingway have become so separated from who he actually was.

41:23Jeff:Calcified and one-sided. What the writing's actually like. I meant to say this in the Who This Is, and at some point, if and when we get to other Hemingways that have ladies at all in it, we will need to get more directly into his depictions of women and gender and race. there are readings of Hemingway that are quite damning and readings that are see a lot more complexity. So I do not want to gloss over because this particular book is not directly at stake, though I think it is indirectly at stake in some in some degrees, that those some of his predictions, maybe all of them depending on you want to listen to, or you can be compelled by or your own reading of The Sun Also Rises, or you know, many of the novels where there are love interests and women and Jewish people and black people more directly.

42:08It's not smooth sailing for a contemporary understanding. But anyway, that's not...

42:13Jeff:Complicated to say the least. But it's not really on... It made me think of it because the one black person we get here is this arm wrestler who at one point, Santiago says, who's a wonderful man and a wonderful arm wrestler. And that's kind of all we get. Santiago himself, his own racial identity is a little complicated. He's living in the Caribbean, but he seems to be an immigrant from Spain. So how we think about his identity at this point kind of exceeds, gets outside of a black, white, person of color, not person of color, especially in the location which he's in. I think it's, we didn't say this, but these are Spanish speaking people.

42:47This is all in English, but we do get Hemingway relating Spanish sentence forms in English. I noticed, especially when like the Tigers of Detroit, we would not say that in English. We say the Detroit Tigers, but in Spanish, you'd say a different way. There's some other things that bleed into it here. So that's another piece of how Hemingway deals with racial, cultural, linguistic difference is pretty fascinating. There's been all kinds of critical work on how that appears here. But on the other hand, as you say, I'm so glad you said this is about generosity and connection. He's trying to relate to his ward, his protege, fisher boy.

43:24He's trying to think of his connection to the fish. He's trying to think about his connection to nature. He's cross-identifying with the small birds, right? He feels so bad for the little birds. and how fragile they are.

43:34Jeff:It's lovely. And like, I didn't expect to be using the word lovely talking about this book. But there's this reciprocity between him, between Santiago and Manolin, the young boy. And like, that's the main attraction. But Santiago also has this deep respect and connection for nature that that's the star for me. He's out there in this boat. He's like literally fighting for his life. And he's looking at porpoises and thinking they're good. They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish. And then he's talking to the fish as he's reeling it in and saying, fish, I love you and respect you very much, but I will see you dead before this day ends.

44:14Jeff:And there's just this humility to it as well. Like Santiago has a moment of saying, man is not much beside the great birds and beasts. That for being as like swashbuckling as our image of Hemingway is, the character here is doing swashbuckly things, but it's not swaggering. Like this is not a swaggering man. This is a man who's like, he hasn't caught a fucking fish in 84 days. I mean, I had forgotten it had been that long. He's one of the great dry spells. And I think I have this in my quotes that he admits to himself and to the fish eventually that he's gone too far out. Like he's gone to extreme because he's desperate.

44:57He's thinking maybe he's lost it, right? It's hard not to read Hemingway's own biography as being at play here a little bit. It's been a long time since he had a hit. Same with Santiago, a formerly great, renowned fisher person who seems to be long in the tooth. He's just sort of trying to... He has to buy coffee on credit, for God's sakes. So that desperation really comes into play here. Let's see. Yeah. Long sentence description. and you say heroes and limit, there are heroes in myths, but also the limits of heroes in myth, right? There's nested myth-making happening. If you think about it, both on the level of the text and on the level of this, you know, super text.

45:39So Santiago is the center of the story, but his idol is Joe DiMaggio, right? Who's a baseball player. And you can actually identify the time this is by how they're relaying what they've heard Joe DiMaggio doing. It's like early September of 1950 because the Manolin and Santiago were talking about what DiMaggio is doing and what he hasn't done. DiMaggio, of course, the great hitter for the New York Yankees, who had maybe an unbreakable record, 56-game hitting streak, probably will never be broken. People often talk about it as one of the most unbreakable records in sports. A mythic person of himself who his own father was a Fisher person.

46:14And of course, the most famous of all Fisher people, the big JC. That's all over this at the same time. And Hemingway is a fisher person. And then Manilin is idolizing Santiago. So there's kind of a family tree of myths. And one thing I think that's interesting about that too is that DiMaggio is not a happy person. Santiago, would you call him a happy person? Would you call Hemingway a happy person? Christ is sacrificed. Like, it doesn't go great for the legends, right? That's one of the ironies of the myth and the legend in this particular.

46:43Jeff:And St. James is known as Santiago in Spanish. You can hike the Camino de Santiago to Santiago de Compostela where St. James is buried. And there's all of this. I've hiked a portion of it. And there's all of this stuff along the way about the fishermen and the pilgrims carry scallop shells on your packs now to pay homage and symbolize that you are a pilgrim on the way because that's what they did back then. But even Santiago's name has a meaning here that connects us to the legacies of fishing and also sort of the mythology and the symbolism of fishing. Yeah. I also have, I mean, one of the questions that this book asks that we don't, we'll get to when we get to our moral question, our ask segment, but what in the hell are we to make of the difference between humans and the natural world?

47:31Like literally, what are we supposed to do? Because it's Santiago and I think Hemingway, and I think the book is very conflicted about say, hunting and fishing, even overtly. Like, Santiago is driven to take this fish. Some of it is a economic reality. Like, this is his occupation. But he feels conflicted about it. Like, you're my brother, but I must kill you. Like, what the hell is that? I don't really know what to do with that. And I do not think, Rebecca, tell me if you think differently. I do not think that question is answered in the book. I do not think it comes to, like, this is how we should understand a religion.

48:03kind of any Genesis, humans are the masters of nature, but also not, you're my brothers, and I'm going to kill you. And I love porpoises and the dolphin fish, but also, I don't know. I feel like Hemingway, Santiago, and the book are all very much like, this is fraught. I feel some connection here, and yet.

48:24Jeff:Yeah, I agree with that. I think that he's, that's kind of the humility that I was talking about, that there's not any joy of domination between Santiago and this fish. And there's no desire to dominate. And that also runs counter to the mythology that we have about Hemingway and that whole manly man presentation. Like trophy hunting, like modern trophy hunting is like you pay a lot of money to bag a lion on a reserve so you can get the picture of it with you and your paramilitary gear. The friend that Hemingway's writing that letter to that inspires this book. Same thing. That guy is like, but come on and take down some elephants with us and then you'll really know what life is about.

49:05Jeff:And Hemingway's like, no, dude, it's out there in this boat. You're just you and the sea and the fish. And that's what it's all about. And that fraughtness is inescapable, but that Santiago is bringing this humility of I love you and I've gone too far and I've made it too hard for both of us. And I'm like, I'm sorry, but this is how it has to be. I have to kill you in order to survive myself, both for food and for economic survival, that I think if Hemingway has any answer, it's not about like, what to do, but to try to approach that conflict between humans and the natural world, the difficulty of that relationship with some kind of humility and respect.

49:45Jeff:Today's episode is brought to you by Tidewater Press, publishing nonfiction that enlightens as it entertains. It's the publisher of Ice in Their Veins, Women's Relentless Pursuit of the Puck by Ian Kennedy. Hockey wasn't meant to include girls, not originally. Women attracted to the speed, the finesse, the physicality of the game had to overcome condescending attitudes, lack of resources, legal barriers, and even sexual assault in their quest for legitimacy and ice time. For more than 150 years, their gender was questioned, monitored, hidden, disparaged, and trivialized. Even so, teams were formed and stars emerged.

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50:59Jeff:This episode is brought to you by Quince. I've been doing a spring reset with my closet. Less stuff, better stuff. And Quince has been central to that. I'm particularly obsessed lately with their European linen shirts and dresses. Living in the South, linen season basically starts in March and it doesn't end until October. So I need pieces that really work and that hold up. And these do both of those things. A linen shirt on its own with jeans or layered under a denim jacket in the morning when it's still cool, thrown over a swimsuit. It just goes everywhere. The dresses are the same way. The fabric feels substantial without being heavy and the fits are thoughtful enough that you actually look like you tried.

51:37Jeff:That's the thing about quints. They use genuinely premium materials, work directly with ethical factories, and cut out the middlemen so the prices don't match how good everything feels. Linen piece is starting around$50. It shouldn't work, but it does. Go to quince.com slash wellread for free shipping and 365-day returns. That's quince.com slash wellread. Thanks to them for sponsoring. yeah i i think the difference between fishing and hunting as both as pursuits but also as metaphors are interesting here like the kind of knowledge santiago has to deploy the very limited technology right he has to have knowledge enough to catch bait that's big enough he has to catch a 10 pound tuna to use his bait right so there's there's so it's so stripped down it's his boat his harpoon and like a mile of coil and some hooks, right?

52:31This is not an elephant gun and infrared goggles and, you know, Jeeps and stuff. It's very like a little bit of human technology, but mostly it's about knowledge of where the fish are, what they're going to do when you catch them, and then how to control your physical body. What's asked of Santiago to catch this fish is categorically different than most fishing and hunting stories you're going to hear about. A multi-day effort of will, perseverance, knowledge, and sort of spiritual reckoning, for lack of a better term, that happens at the same time.

53:03Jeff:There's that old saw that most of us have probably heard that they shouldn't really, they don't call it catching, they call it fishing. Fishing, right. That it's truly about the attempt and the patience and the waiting and all of the things that go into it and kind of the practice of it. It's not language that Hemingway or Santiago uses, but he's been out there in this boat every day for the last 84 days doing the same things, using his tools, making himself available if the fish want to come. And you're still subject to just serendipity, luck, what's going to happen. And you can't escape being subject to that.

53:44Jeff:And you have to continue practicing the thing. The only thing to do is to get in the boat and take all your gear and show up every day and hope that it works out. That's what literature is metaphor. So one thing that happens in writing like Hemingway's where it tends to be more spare, I guess what's the opposite? Vineland? Vineland is the opposite of Hemingway. When you think there's so much, it's hard to know what your eyes should affix to. But one thing that happens here is we get so much fish, we get so much sea, we get so much fish, we get so much sea, that when we are told that he at this point in his life only can dream of lions when he dreams.

54:18On the coast of Africa when he was a kid, you can't help but notice. Like in football, it's like a play-action pass, right? You run the ball, run the ball, run the ball, run the ball, and then you pass. It's like, whoa, a pass all of a sudden. So you can't help notice this lion stuff. It's like DiMaggio and the lions are the thing to me that kind of stick out that would not sort of be naturally fitting in just a story of someone on the sea, if that's what you think, that's all that's happening here. I actually don't have a ready-made, super confident read on the lions. You have pride, strength, courage.

54:48Of course, Jesus, the lion, Aslan, Narnia, that would be a little bit later. But that he's still dreaming of a frontier, of a different kind of predator. Is he the lion? Is he subject to the lion? I'm not sure what to do with it, Rebecca, but it would make a good ninth grade English essay if someone - Oh, you know that there are dissertations

55:08Jeff:about all of that. Right. But stray thoughts. A lot of stray thoughts on this one. I spent some time really joking with my husband about how this book should actually be called The Old Man and the Fish. This story is The Old Man and the Fish. There's probably also a dissertation somewhere about his choice to use The Old Man and the Sea. But the longer that I tried to play the joke out, the more I came around to like, actually, it's correct that it's The Old Man and the Sea. Because that's the story is that he's out there with the sea every day and he's waiting for a fish. Well, and this giant mythological fish is sort of like, it is the sea.

55:45It's like the heart of the sea, like the jewel from Titanic. Like this is the soul of the sea I'm wrestling with, like figuratively and literally.

55:52Jeff:Yeah. Hemingway's grandson, Sean, wrote the intro to the edition that I read, and he cites the old man in the sea as the most marvelous piscatorial contribution of American literature above even Moby Dick, which that's a flex. But I loved the use of piscatorial. piscatorial. I'm not sure I've heard that word before. And that got me thinking, what are the other great fishing novels? Like, is it just this? Moby Dick and a River Runs Through It? I can't even think of anything else that's about fishing. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of writing. I mean, like John Gerak. Yeah. There's a lot of nonfiction.

56:27But in terms of novels, I don't have anything that comes to the fore. I have two other thoughts about his grandson's sentence, and I'd like to enter them into the record. First of all, I think Hemingway himself would have hated the word Piscatorial, just for the record. Piscatorial is relating to fish, and Moby Dick is a whale. And that's a mammal. That is not even a fish. So that's my note for Sean Hemingway.

56:49Jeff:Oh, you just well-actuallyed Sean Hemingway. All right. I'm just saying here. We can't all be the greats. Like, literally, literally. All right. The Court of Rightness sees your objection and recognizes it. Okay. This is the one I really couldn't stop thinking about. I cannot go on a five-mile hike without worrying about whether I have enough water. This whole thing is a dehydration nightmare. He has one bottle of water. We get descriptions of like the fish is on the line. He's got the line towed over his shoulder. So he only has one functioning hand and that hand is injured. And he's got to like somehow get to the corner of the skiff that has the water bottle in it and take a little sip and just try to make it.

57:36Jeff:And I was just like, oh, my God, like just the dehydration and like just the bodily experience of this felt so visceral to me. But what it would be like to be in the sun and to be that thirsty while you're doing this intensely physical thing for three days and three nights. I had the same note that Santiago feels shockingly unprepared. but I want to counterbalance that with he's, he mentioned several times that I have gone out so far, even says to the fish, both for you and for me at one point, but we get the repetition of that. And one of the consequences of not having spent, like there's a version of this story where we get like his earlier fishing adventures.

58:19Like what's a normal day look like? I think it's hard to get a sense of how abnormal this experience is for Santiago. He's not unprepared for this. He's prepared for a sort of normal day fishing. This is an abnormal day fishing. to the point that when we come back to the shore at the end of the story, like we've been told that essentially the Coast Guard and everybody's been looking him for several days, right? Like, so he is beyond the pale of the known. And that's important to remember. But you didn't bring an extra, you're going to fish for your food, but he didn't think he was gonna be out there for a few days holding on to a 1500 pound Marlin.

58:50Jeff:You know, for years and years, this has been what he's done. And never has he gotten up and caught a 1500 pound tuna and had to deal with this. Like, we would use the language in our company of like we don't solve for edge cases like you can't get up every morning and load your boat up with the things you would need just in case you catch the biggest fish in the world like you just have to be prepared for what the sort of average expectation should be and he he is prepared it's not like um cheryl straight going out to hike in wild where she's never laced up a pair of boots and her pack has 500 pounds worth of stuff in it you know like Santiago knows what he's doing and he's got the gear but just like no one goes out for what they think is a normal day expecting to catch a fish this big and then to be out there for three days and three nights and so it does have also that like mythic quality to it that when you hear about how big the fish is and how much it weighs and how hard it is to reel in and how long he's out there there is kind of a just a vibe to reading this that's like am I actually supposed to believe that Santiago caught this fish or are we doing something else here?

59:58As you were talking, I was remembering A Perfect Storm. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a nonfiction about fisher people. It's more about surviving a storm. That's another great read on that. But I think, you know, one thing I didn't think about too until you just said that is reads like a survival story, right? It does, yeah. This book, the difference being at any point he could cut the line. At any point he could give up on the fish. Now, we know sort of psycho-emotionally he can't do it. He even tells us he can't do it. But part of what this is, this is a survival story of choice and of testing himself.

1:00:30And it becomes something beyond the economic necessity, because at some point he catches another Marlin on the other line and he chooses to let that one go, even though it's probably more manageable. He could land that and get that home and sort of make his nut for the month or whatever. But this is about something other than normal human behavior. This is outside the scope of just him getting through his days. This is a trial of the soul and a trial of the imagination, a trial of will. And so he is willfully, he says, I will gladly die in this pursuit, but I'm going to try this thing. So when we see unprepared, he is unprepared, of course, but then that hardship becomes part of the value of it, right?

1:01:09At the same time. I would just never stop barfing between the movements of the waves and the nausea and eating the raw fish. The sunburn alone, they even talked about the skin cancer that's forming on this guy. Like it's really hard out there for a ginger like you and a motion sick prone like me. I think we'd probably be the world's worst duo to land a 1500 pound marlin using only line in like dolphin fish.

1:01:32Jeff:Yeah, I'm just gonna either throwing myself into the sea or like, no, we ran out of water. I'm going back home. We can fish again tomorrow. Yeah, you would turn into a Slim Jim. You would just be a burnt, crispy, dried up husk of meat. Live to fish another day. Let's like, we don't need this. My own stray thoughts are I've never seen a person more in need of one of those doffle encounter things you could do at resorts. Do you think we have this story if he gets to run around with dolphins at Atlantis Bahamas? Just get a hug from a manatee. Just kind of see a different level of communing with nature and conservation.

1:02:01It's so interesting to think about this. I always think about overfishing and how even this fish is mythic. It's within the bounds of the possible, but I don't know if people know this, but you can't catch fish like this anymore because there's so much overfishing. In these days, in Hemingway's days of early fishing, Leviathan still roamed the Caribbean where he could land these giant fish, which just there's so much fishing commercial and sport and otherwise that this is actually a lost world. But even in the moment, it feels like a lost world. Like this is a mythic kind of beast in Leviathan that he's kept seeing.

1:02:30Jeff:It feels like it's out of time. Yes. The market rate for marlin slash swordfish was just 30 cents a pound. didn't seem like a whole lot because he's doing the math like okay if it's you know there's going to be a third of it that's like guts and scales yeah i can't sell that there's only like a thousand pounds there's like 300 bucks yeah three bucks a pound now yeah yeah 1950 300 bucks would be a lot of money 3 000 it's because that's like 30 cents a 30 cents oh today you can have a thousand pounds yeah yeah yeah so it's i get and i think that also says we're not talking about someone with a lot of money and we get we get very sly hints that he is really subsistence fishing at this particular point yeah did hemingway ruin florida and my thought here is is the following is without the popularity of the old man in the sea as a i think unintentionally make sport fishing a thing that men do for fun and masculine proving of self.

1:03:34What did this do to commercial fishing? We read about Jurassic Park as a bunch of people became paleontologists, or with the big Lebowski comes out and everyone is drinking white Russians. These things can matter over time. Is the history of Florida different without Hemingway himself and Old Man in the Sea specifically? I don't know if you can know this, but this is one of my straight thoughts. That's why they go in the straight thoughts.

1:03:57Jeff:This experience in this book is not a great ad for a move to Florida, but the Hemingway of it all might be. I mean, there's certainly a lot of tourism built up around Hemingway, especially in Key West now. All right, let's do some quotes. You pulled the number one quote on Goodreads, Rebecca. What is it? It's not that weird this time. It's every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky, but I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes, you are ready. And that did make me think, is this where we got be ready when the luck happens? which is the thing people say and also the title of Ina Garten's memoir.

1:04:32I'm going back to our old pal, the unlucky Dane, the readiness is all. There's special providence in the fall of the sparrow, the readiness is all for Hamlet. But the same idea. Fortune favors the prepared. You know, I think this has been around for a little bit. Where else do you want to go? I have some. You have some. We can ping pong back and forth.

1:04:48Jeff:I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution. Pretty good. Good tattoo. I have many tricks and I have resolution. Would that be our literary quote? It's a good one. I think that is. I know many tricks that I have. Resolution is a good tattoo from this. I also really liked, he looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now, but he could see the prisms in the dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade winds, and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again, and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

1:05:27I had that. I'm glad you had this. I was going to pull that out too. It's just beautiful. Yeah. It's just pretty. It's pretty, Rebecca. I don't know what to say. That's pretty. A romanticism to it. Yeah, it is.

1:05:35Jeff:It's gorgeous. No man is an island. No man is alone. Like literally saying, you're not alone. And it is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides, I believe it is a sin. So much Christian stuff. Again, Catholics and like is very much in the culture that Santiago is named and he's participating in. But Hemingway does not downplay it. In fact, he gives it specificity. I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad. I was going to pull this up into the biography because people may know that Hemingway ended his life with a shotgun after a diagnosis.

1:06:16We don't really know. There's like a whole book called Hemingway's Brain trying to figure out what led him to have the kind of mental health issues he was clearing at the end of his life. His father committed suicide. Two of his siblings committed suicide. He was diagnosed with a condition earlier where iron builds up in the brain, which is a hereditary. There's a thought that maybe this was passed along. But I thought it was interesting here at the end of his life that the pain can drive you mad. And if you can no longer control your pain or even think about controlling your pain, that is something that can make you crazy to your detriment.

1:06:54and it is the single distinguishing factor between him and the great fish. Whereas he can think about his pain. He can say, there is my pain. I know what it is. I can control it. And here's what's going to happen. Whereas the fish does not have that same capability. And that is why I think we're ultimately getting, why does the fish win? Because of this, right? Because of this, the human ability to recognize pain, to contain it, to honor it, to hold it, but not let them drive you out of your mind, except having his own life and what we know about pain, what we know about mental, there is a limit to that.

1:07:26And Santiago was taken right up to it. If this was a five, this was a 1 ,501 pound Marlin, I think Santiago is dead. It doesn't work.

1:07:34Jeff:It's right at the edges of his capacity. That's right. I also have, I should not have gone so far out fish, he said, neither for you nor for me. I'm sorry, fish. I would also encourage readers, if they do pick this up, to notice the farther Santiago gets from shore and the deeper into the struggle he gets, the more he talks to himself aloud. And the more the pronouns and things get messed up and he talks directly to the fish. That's interesting. There, DiMaggio. I just wanted to get one DiMaggio thing in, but I must think, he thought, because it is all I have left, that and baseball. I wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked the way I hit him in the brain, talking about one of the sharks he fended off.

1:08:12It was no great thing, he thought. Any man could do it. But do you think my hands were as great a handicap as the bone spurs? I cannot know. He's fixated on DiMaggio, has these bones spurs that kept him, that was a hardship to overcome. I think that's one of the reasons he identifies with DiMaggio is that he's got this, it's known that he has this other ailment that he sort of lives with every day. He's not a perfect specimen, right? He's not Hercules. Yeah, these are not godlike bodies. He's human overcoming the limitations of the physical body, which I thought was cool. I think this was, to me, the subtlest explanation of what expertise can afford you.

1:08:50thinks, he thought of how some men feared being out of sight of land in a small boat and he knew they were right in the months of sudden and bad weather. But now they were in hurricane months. And when there are no hurricanes, the weather of hurricane months is the best all year. So it's not denying or being cavalier in the face of where the danger is, but knowing where the danger is and knowing how to navigate it and going out and sailing in hurricane season, knowing that, well, if there's not a hurricane, it's going to be great. If hurricane comes, great. But like, I actually am more afraid of non-hurricane months because it's much less predictable to voyage out at that point.

1:09:26So there's that. Anything else you wanted to get here?

1:09:29Jeff:No, I mean, we could do this all day. For being 80 pages long, there are so many wonderful lines. I have my close read section for the office hours. Should I tease that or just save it? Let's just save it. Let's just save it. It's about sharks. I guess I'll say enough about that. Rebecca is this for you? Yes Why might this be for you? Yes It's 80 pages long It's for you Yes Yeah I think just do it and linger As you were saying Don't Just because the sentences are short Don't rush through it My husband crashed on the couch And like ended up taking one of the great epic naps As I was reading this And so I was It's like when you're trapped under the dog or the baby Like I was not going to move anyway because I'm not going to get up and make noise while a big, much needed nap was happening.

1:10:21Jeff:But it was like, all right, might as well just dwell here with Hemingway. And that ended up being such a gift. Like concoct that for yourself. Take the time. I really struggled to come up with maybe not for you. Things that there's this short, I mean, unless there's really difficult subject matter, I guess if you're an animal cruelty person, maybe, you know, this is not a dog dies situation. Maybe there's something to that, but it's pretty minor as these things go. The immortal questions that aren't asked, which of these is primary? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know?

1:10:57Is this all there is? How do you deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? what's the deal with good and evil free will or no i mean it's kind of all of them and kind of

1:11:09Jeff:none of them it's not one doesn't jump out to me yeah i mean there's he's doing this because it's the thing that he knows how to do in order to survive so that sort of feeds back to what is the good life. Yes. There's a little dealing with the certainty of death here or with the possibility of death. He's facing down himself and real danger. But there is a line where Santiago thinks to himself, he's like, he's talking to himself, as you were saying, you were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish. And that's not free will stuff, but it is fate stuff. And I think that's, if there's anything there, maybe we go and maybe we add an immortal question to like, how do we relate?

1:12:00Jeff:How are we to make sense of our relationship to the natural world? But that seems to be what Hemingway is really dealing with. Yeah, I think is this all there is? He is, in a way, Santiago is a kind of explorer in which he is testing the limits of the known, both for himself and us and the human, right? Where is that limit? And that's one way of seeing the lions on the shores of Africa being there is something to being in nature differently than humans are in nature that's inaccessible to us as humans, but it's out there. And how close do you get to it? What danger lurks when you get there? I think there's also something about what is the good life.

1:12:36Like one of the reasons that he chooses not to cut the line is this feels like a life's purpose, to have a purpose. I think this idea goes all the way back to Aristotle of happiness is getting what you want and keeping it. But it's also of using your skills and strengths at the highest level, right? That's what purpose looks like. Sometimes at work, we call that sharp tools and interesting problems. This is the sharpest tool and interesting problems that Sancti, it's going to test him. And he's going to find out what he can do by coming up exactly to the edge of what he can do. Right? You only find your limit when you touch it.

1:13:17Jeff:Yeah. So that's a what is a good life to me. Yeah. I think that's right on. Are we sure this is about art and writing? I mean, despite Hemingway's insistence that it wasn't about anything, the whole get up every morning and get out there in the boat and do the thing and see what happens. Sure sounds like a pep talk for a writer. Just get up and do it every day. And sooner or later, you'll catch the fish. And I'm going to go with yes. Yeah, the quiet accumulation of mastery of many, many repetitions. I do not think Hemingway would be a fan of hacks of life hacks. I don't think that's where Hemingway would be suggesting that valor and glory lies.

1:13:57Jeff:Hemingway would be friction maxing. Yeah, right. Which could you get most of the gist from watching a The Signal adaptation? There have been many attempts, but none of them have become The Signal adaptation, which I think says something like many have tried. No one has succeeded. You have a note here that Hemingway hated the Spencer Tracy version. I haven't seen any of these. I don't feel any desire to watch an adaptation of this. It really feels to me like a book doing things that books can do, which is not always the case. Sentences doing things that only sentences. This is sentence work here, Rebecca.

1:14:31Let's keep it to the sentence. I agree.

1:14:33Jeff:Into our next question then, would we want it as a movie, a musical, a TV series, or something with the Muppets? I didn't want any of them, but I thought a lot about a book that we both loved a few years ago called Heartbreak by Florence Williams, where part of the audio book is excerpts from an audio journal that she kept while she was out in the wild on camping trips and canoeing through the Grand Canyon and reflecting on a recent end of a relationship. And I kind of was like, well, if we have to do anything, a heartbreak style like audio journal from Santiago is the only thing I might be interested in.

1:15:08Jeff:But I think this is a pretty perfect work of literature. Yeah. I think a really good audio book could be cool. Maybe one of those cases where one of those enhanced audio books, you get a little waves and maybe you get some soundscape and it could be cool. Just call, I don't know, Nick Offerman and let's do it. Yeah, I need to spend some more time thinking about audiobook narrators here, but that's a pretty interesting one. All right, we've got a long section of trivia adaptations, rumors, and quotes. Let's bolt through these, Rebecca. Well, if you're reading this along and you're like, how deep is a fathom?

1:15:38Jeff:I have to Google it. A fathom is six feet or two yards. So Santiago's deepest bait is at 25 fathoms. That's 50 yards. And his line can go out to 300 fathoms, which is 600 yards. That's 1 ,800 feet. So a third of a mile. That's so much reeling in for a 1 ,500-pound fish. You've got the water and your cramped hand and a marlin fighting for its life on the other side of that. That's so much line to reel in. I think maybe my favorite trivia related to Hemingway, not specific to this book, is that he was discovered by Maxwell Perkins. You name-checked him earlier in the episode. Perkins was the same editor at Scribner who published Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnon-Rawlings, who wrote The Yearling, and Thomas Wolfe.

1:16:26Jeff:So like just a hell of a run and probably beat only by in contemporary publishing Sonny Mehta, who died a couple of years ago, but was the Random House editor who did Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. And those are just a couple, like just a huge long list for Sonny Mehta. But the only two legendary editors that I can name off the top of my head, and the book is dedicated to Charlie Scribner and Max Perkins. Let's see. I'll do a couple of mine. I talked about him losing a half decade to writing in depression. This is something we cooked up when we did an old series we used to do called Annotated about this was about Ulysses, but Sylvia Beach, who owned Shakespeare and Company in Paris who was the French publisher of Ulysses, was looking for ways to get it into the U.S.

1:17:12It was banned in the U.S. And one day she was sitting around basically brainstorming with some other people and this young guy in the back of the store pipes up. It's like, I know a guy in Detroit that commutes from Canada to Detroit every day from work. I bet he could get some copies in. And that young man was Ernest Hemingway. So he was instrumental in getting the, and this sounds like a Hemingway thing to do, is to smuggle Ulysses in to the U.S. across a boat. He also has maybe the greatest narrated scene of someone trying to get from one country to another in the form of a boat at the end of Farewell to Arms.

1:17:44No spoilers. Lots of speculation about the suicide, I'd say, there. Just also a guy, you know, kind of accident prone, but he also puts himself into places where he'd get an accident. Relatable. He almost died twice in plane crashes. He almost lost his leg in World War I. There's some other injuries as well, but my favorite one is he once gave himself a concussion by pulling off a light fixture off the ceiling that he thought was the pull chain for a toilet.

1:18:10Jeff:Yeah, totally. Doc Browned himself. He almost invented the flux capacitor when he was taking a dump one night and didn't know how to operate the toilet. So funny. The largest collection of his notes and papers are at the JFK Library in Boston, which is kind of a strange place at first look for Hemingway's stuff to end up. Hemingway and JFK never knew each other, but they did have great admiration for each other. And it turns out that when he was writing Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy wrote to Hemingway to ask permission to use Hemingway's definition of courage, which is grace under pressure, which also, not for nothing, a great subtitle for the old man.

1:18:49Jeff:Unbelievable. I don't think I remember that that idea of grace under pressure. It's Hemingway. I knew that definition of courage. I didn't know it was Hemingway. Also, another good tattoo for those out there. That reminds me of another one that Hemingway and his then wife, Martha, were living in Cuba when the revolution was beginning to happen. They got some rumblings that things were going to happen there. So they busted tail and left a bunch of their possessions, including all of Hemingway's books and some notes and manuscripts. And I believe those are either gone or salted away, kind of like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Largest.

1:19:21Some warehouse in Cuba has Hemingway stuff that might be at Goldman for some point.

1:19:25Jeff:Yeah, they're off with wherever the paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are. Yes, yeah. Yeah. I think that's it for now. Yeah, we've got a lot of those. Would you like to go to hot takes? Sure. Hemingway would be a real PR liability for a publisher today, like the Hemingway of it all. And that would be such a loss. Like, my hot take here is maybe it was better when we knew less about the people that were making the great books, or we were more willing to let them be weird and bad and complicated. And I don't know how to square that with my 2026 social and political sensibilities about like, I don't want anybody to be mistreated.

1:20:01Jeff:I don't want women to experience the things that they experienced in relationships with Hemingway. I also want us to have books like this. And we're not going to do a can we separate the art from the artist kind of thing. But I just spent so much time being grateful that I have this book to read and thinking about how an author living and existing the way that Hemingway did in the social world today would not be allowed the kind of spotlight and the kind of social acceptance that Hemingway was, for better and for worse. But I just had to say something about it. It is so tingly and complex. We're not going to solve it.

1:20:41Without a trade-off to have a certain kind of expectation of ideology and behavior from artists. It actually makes me think of a Hemingway quote, I believe. I'm doing this off the dome, so I'm sorry if this is wrong. He once said, Shakespeare's worth any number of old ladies, meaning I don't care if people get pissed off or worried because the art matters more than the sensibilities of a bunch of pearl clutchers. I guess that would be useful for Hemingway to say. But I think there is something about art, which is the things that last, the things that resonate are the things that plumb previously unplumbed depths.

1:21:13And one factor of that might be you need to transgress in some way. What are we willing to let people who are exploring in any number of ways? It could be scientific research. It could be all kinds of things. What depths are we willing to let them plumb that have been unplumbed? What transgressions are we willing to allow them that may cross the barrier of what we believe is acceptable, warrantable, laudable or even legal behavior, I don't know the answer to it, but I feel similarly to you, which is it is not easy. And to circumscribe what people can think and feel and do means some things that you might want to be thought, some country you might want to be discovered will go undiscovered because of that circumscription.

1:21:51My hot take is if you're going to write a novel about a thing, go do that thing, love that thing, revel in that thing, write about things that are not you, but that you have fallen in love with or are fascinated by. That's my hot take. Yeah. Read-alikes, recommendation, books inspired by, and other artistic experience that may scratch the same itch. Rebecca, what'd you have?

1:22:10Jeff:I mean, Hemingway is really the only true read-alike for Hemingway. But as I thought about this, I think James Salter is a contender. Salter, yeah. Very much in the shadow. Yeah, one of my favorites, but a large catalog of work, but solo faces about rock climbers and the hunters, about World War I pilots. It's just there's a rugged old school masculinity to Salter as well. Hunter is a great pull. I think that's one. And I think it's related in a lot of ways. It's like a young man in a plane. A young man in the sky is maybe a good way of thinking about Hunter. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's like a more refined, like high literary version.

1:22:49Jeff:But I mean, people are not reading James Salter enough. So if the thing I achieve here is five people listening to this, go pick up a James Salter novel. That'll be a huge win for me. More contemporary stuff. We both really like Peter Heller's adventure novels. That's true. Like, usually it's dudes versus nature in some kind of way. They're a little more on the thriller side, but, like, interesting. And then I spent a ton of time on this reading thinking about A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst. Out on a boat. Yep, which came out last year. Yeah, true story about a married couple stranded in the ocean after their boat sank.

1:23:23Jeff:And they're out there for like months, just in a tiny lifeboat, running out of food, figuring out how to capture sea turtles with their bare hands, trying not to kill each other and keep their morale up. Like a great read, harrowing stuff. Kind of depends on what you're looking for from a read-alike. Mine is something that Hemingway himself recommended. It's a memoir called West by Night by Beryl Markham, who was a pilot, and she became a horse trainer and a very sort of notable person, I think, in 1942 as a publication date. This is Hemingway's own review. She has written so well and marvelously well that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer.

1:24:02I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. it really is a bloody wonderful book. If I got that review from Hemingway I think I would dissipate into atoms of...

1:24:21Jeff:You just hang it up that day. Like we're done. We're done here. I will say it is quite good. I would love to know if there's a... I can look this up. If there is a great audiobook version of this now. An underrated gem of a book. You've recommended that to me in the past and I still haven't gotten to it but I think it's a contender. I think you'd like it. I think I would too. I think it's a good zero to well-read contender. Yeah. Cocktail party crib sheet, three to five takeaways, Rebecca. What do we have? You can do anything with discipline, perseverance, and a little community support. And really, it's that humans are made of tougher stuff than we give ourselves credit for.

1:24:54Jeff:And Hemingway says this, or Santiago says it, but man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed, but not defeated. And it really is just get up and get back in the damn boat and do the thing. Yeah. Mine is quite simple here. Hemingway's writing is not what you think it is. It just isn't. A final beat, our zero to well-read score, each one gets a score of one to 10, with 10 being the highest. Our five vectors of evaluation are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read cred, and oh damn factor. As you might have, listeners, you might have heard us at the beginning, it is not the book that made Hemingway, but is the book that preserved Hemingway as a, I think it's not impossible to say that.

1:25:40So again, 10 is not on the board. I don't know that it's the, is it the most important of Hemingway's books? I really struggled with this when I was looking at it. I'm gonna go - I mean, he's not in a position to write this without Sun Also Rises or Farewell to Arms or the early short story. So I don't think it can be those, but maybe -

1:25:56Jeff:It does feel like a real capstone to the Hemingway. Yeah, I think eight, eight and a half. Yeah, somewhere in there. Readability approaches 10, if not a 10. I think it's a 10. Like it's, what would make it more readable? I mean, look, it is, is it as readable as the most commercial of commercial fiction, like page turners? Is that a 10? If we're grading on a curve for the kind of book we're going to talk about, it's a 10. But I think if we're actually looking in the full range of what people might pick up to read, it's a nine. All right, fine. Yeah. Current relevance of central questions. That would imply I know exactly what the questions are, but let's assume that for a moment we have some sense.

1:26:36Yes.

1:26:38Jeff:It feels relevant. It feels very just potent. It feels relevant in the way that like myths and tall, like they are and aren't relevant. Yeah. I think the infinity symbol is the answer to this question. Yeah. It's like, can we do a five slash 10? I don't know enough. They're like the square root of negative two. Isn't one of those like an impossible number? We need Douglas Adams to show up and invent us a number for this. Yeah. Yeah. I think we just invented a new rating. Let's do it with the square root of negative two for the current relevance of central question. It's sort of, it is above and beyond and around that.

1:27:10Book nerd read cred. There's part of me that's like, this isn't low. But on the other hand, I think it's sort of gone around the horseshoe theory of like, it's gone around the bend where so many people know about it and think they know what it is that they don't actually pick it up. Like, what is this book about? So I'm not sure, Rebecca.

1:27:25Jeff:I'm going to go with an eight here for that reason. And as always, like, if you have picked up a book that's commonly assigned in English classes, but you have picked it up after your schooling ended on your own, you get a higher score. O'Dam factor. Again, I do not want to fall prey to the thing that people fall prey to and think this is simple and easy and it's just sort of there. It is difficult to rate it at the same level as like a Vineland or a Shakespeare. But I think if you look at it from a certain angle, it's right there just from the other, it's like a mirror version. It's the other side of the coin of those kinds of things.

1:27:59Jeff:The oh damn for me was in how many times it was not the book I was expecting it to be. So I'm going with a nine. Yeah. Pretty high score here for Hemingway. Who's surprised? I'm not as surprised. I didn't know what your own experience would be reading it. I'm so glad that it resonated and had some juice for you. Okay. That brings us to the end of our show. You can follow us on socials at Zero to Well Read Podcast. Use an email, zero to well read at bookriot.com. You can go to patreon.com slash zero to well read for our detailed show notes, our free newsletter and membership options, one of which includes the office hours we are about to record, which we're going to do some close reading of a little section of Old Man and the Sea.

1:28:40Thanks so much to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. And Rebecca, what number? What are we proud to be?

1:28:47Jeff:We are proud to be a member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Yes, we are. Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next time. See you all next time.

1:29:00We'll see you next time.