This is like Ozark but old and with fisherman. Beginning had me pretty hooked, there's a lot of really good action scenes in this. Near the end, the plot gets a little lost in random people - like a tom buchanan style 4 way cheating mess for reasons I still do not understand. I liked it for the drama but only as a housewives viewer and not a reader of this damn story. There's another part before Harry's death reveal where the author pans across random people in the sea who in similar dire situations as Harry and from a literary POV I get it but I had to skip even though I rarely do this.

Also an uncomfortable amount of slurs in this, I know this man lived in a different time but it's still super jarring. Also Hemingway loves to emphasize how ugly and awful every woman in this story is. Like why. There was one chapter where a guy sees Harry's wife looking a little dishevelled as she's walking to the sheriffs office (because her husband was literally helping smuggle Cuban revolutionaries and DID NOT COME HOME) and the guy goes yuck did you see her boobs. That was the whole chapter.

Star allocation:
1 for all the times harry fights for life at sea despite his #2 almost always dead/dying or dead weight
2 for few scenes between harry and his wife, this man can write romance missed opp, should've just dropped the scenes about literal fish to make room
3 for when harry kicks the bucket and his wife closes the book by saying she doesnt a shit about her kids lmaoooo ( )

Hmm... starts out really linear, then gets a bit random with a long digression right at the end. Still all types of great, though. ( )

A book club pick ;)

The only Hemingway I’ve ever read was The Old Man and the Sea, and as a school assignment besides. So I voted yes with enthusiasm when my book club suggested we read this one.

I enjoyed the writing from the start. The descriptions of fishing were magnificent. And yet, why would you fight a beautiful creature of the sea, just so that you may win and it may die?

The dialogues are alive, rich and colourful, you can taste them.

“What happened to your arm?” the lawyer asked Harry. Harry has the sleeve pinned up to the shoulder.

“I didn’t like the look of it so I cut it off,” Harry told him.

I liked how Hemingway lets you catch glimpses of a different time and place, with a word here, or just a hint of a scent, a colour there.

Despite all this, I felt annoyed and bored. The women were mostly very silly and ridiculous. In general, there was a lot of “of its time” stuff in here, and I am still not sure how I felt about that. Also, I have seen this story before; I’ve met all these people before, in various reincarnations, in other books. Had this very short novel been better constructed, I would have been willing to overlook this. The POV changes and jumps between first and third person jarred, I felt. The cacophony of characters by the end added nothing to the narrative and just felt chaotic. They were not people, either, they were more like bugs under a magnifying glass – watch them crawl, oh, look, they picked up a piece of shit and are eating it, such weird bugs. I mostly just wanted the book to be over.

P.S. There might be better Hemingways out there. Recommendations, anyone? ( )

A very disjointed tale of several unrelated folk in the Keys, all blustering macho and violent, ( )

Like Hemingway books, this one had its moments but the second half of the book is a mess.
Hemingway’s books don’t travel through time very well as he loved to use the slang of the day, and he was so hung up on making some characters macho, but over time those characters become comically ridiculous. ( )