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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
01:24:36
Jeff and Rebecca dig into Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the book that won him both the Pulitzer and the Nobel, and that he called the best writing he would ever do.
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- [00:00]
Jeff O'Neill
This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks.com it's the old man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. And as you might expect, with something that's well known as this, there's a ton of additions and let me just say I didn't really think about how many iterations of man, boat, giant fish, ocean you could see and still have. A lot of them look really cheesy. It's really a remarkable achievement of human non creativity. To see what's all available there, you can go to thriftbooks.com, and scroll through. You're gonna see a lot of cheesy ones, but you're gonna see some ones that aren't cheesy. The Spanish language ones are especially cool. My Pick is a February 1999 UK edition that has a really cool modernist edition drawing illustration. But you know, go pick out the one you want there would make a great gift for Father's Day, Mother's Day. Someone who wants a beachside read. An accessible, easy to get into classic, which we're gonna talk about right now thanks to Thriftbooks.com, that's for sponsoring this episode of Zero to well Read. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [01:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Jeff, this week you're gonna wanna pour yourself something strong and rum based, which I know is in your wheelhouse. Today we are heading out with Hemingway's the Old man and the Sea.
- [01:27]
Jeff O'Neill
I am so thrilled to be able to talk about Hemingway and the Old man in the Sea and the whole Hemingway industrial complex, which will be something we talk about today. The inherited image of Hemingway that so many people have. I don't know how many authors could stand could bear the ongoing Hemingway lookalike contest that they have every year in Key West. Like there's just not that many where you could do something like this. Like maybe Mark Twain and I'm out. I don't even know who's next on the list.
- [01:56]
Rebecca Schinsky
Mark Twain has the hair Hemingway. It's entirely about the Riz.
- [02:01]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, it's a. It's a cable knit sweater, a strong beard and a square jaw. And that's kind of what you're getting in for there. So a really cool time to reappraise Hemingway who I think you'll find listeners in the course of this show, at least from my point of view and looking at Rebecca's notes. This is not who You Hemingway is not who everyone thinks Hemingway is, is that. But more indifferent and undermines it and subverts it in all kinds of interesting way. An Old man in the Sea. This is a hundred pages. Not even, not even.
- [02:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
My copy was 83 pages plus a bunch of supporting material you can get through in an hour and a half.
- [02:37]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. So a really cool entree. And then I love books about fishing and the sea, so I'm very much in my bag Here you have a shout out you wanted to do. Yeah, we so appreciate this.
- [02:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
A shout out to our listener, Melody or Melanie, who is a librarian. She reported in and said that she has seen spikes in some of the titles that we've talked about here on Zero to well read in her library systems, holds and book requests. Of course some books are, you know, always popular or trending in a bunch of places right now and those we can't tie ourselves to. But she saw Pops for Little Women, 100 Years of Solitude, the Joylet Club and Go Tell it on the Mountain, which I haven't seen anywhere else on big book properties lately. Which tells us that a lot of y' all are picking these up as we talk about them and are reading along with us and we just think that that is super cool. We also heard from another librarian in Australia that there is now a two month hold on the audio edition of Bartleby the Scrivener, which is maybe the best thing that's ever happened in my bookish career to know that, that we could have contributed to that. So if you're out there and you're picking up these books, you are not alone in doing that. And if you are a librarian or a bookseller or somebod who's connected and can see this kind of data, we, you know, can't see the mysterious workings of Amazon book sales. And we would love to hear from you and have any insights that you might have. And so you can always email us of course at zero to well read. Com.
- [04:05]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, it's hard to know with the stuff that's like adaptation like Wuthering Heights or Project Hail Mary. There's plenty of other nodes that those aren't us, but I mean this is actually a pretty good example this week. Rebecca Old man and Sea by Hemingway, but probably has a pretty steady sales. I mean, I'm sure it doesn't vary that much. Maybe summertime. It's probably still taught in schools though. I think that's more like Hills Like White Elephants or short stories here. But this one I'd be curious to see if people are picking this up. And this is one thing we never know. Like we see the download numbers or whatever, but what percentage of those people are matriculating into getting the book from their library, picking up their shelf or buying it at the bookstore. So we will always appreciate your stories if you want to send them to us. Zero to well read@book riot.com let's see. You can find the link in the show notes to our email address, but also our Patreon after the show today we're going to do our office hours that's available to one of our levels of the Patreon member I was going to suggest to you, Rebecca. We usually don't talk about this ahead of time, but I found the link to the 1917 Kansas City Star Style Guide, which is going to be important here in a minute. And I thought maybe we just run down the style recommendations from 1917 in Kansas City Star and evaluate what writing was like, you know, more than a hundred years ago. We'll talk about some other things there too, whatever comes into our mind. So also in addition, we'll be doing a little bit of close reading here at the office hours level. So you know, kind of a grab bag of things to talk about. So that could be interesting. That's@patreon.com 02 well read. You can also go there to find our free weekly newsletter that our managing editor, Vanessa Diaz curates for us. She takes stuff from the show, things she's found. I'm sure she will then drop a link to that 1917 Kansas City Star Style guide that I hear that I just referenced. Lots of stuff you can find also early in ad, free access. And if you don't, if you want to do something to help us keep the show going, Rebecca, what can people do?
- [05:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
People can rate or review the show wherever you're listening. If you're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, what other whatever other secret podcatcher you might be using, just tap that five star button if you've got a little extra time and you'd like to leave a review. That of course helps us know how we're doing, but more importantly helps other people who are looking for a books podcast find their way to us. And we do know that folks are finding the shows because of this. So thanks again to everybody who has rated and reviewed. And we know from a lot of folks who wrote into the mailbag episode that aired last week as you're hearing this, that people are interested in, you know, deepening your reading skills Sharpening those tools. So that's the kind of stuff that we get further into over on office hours. Today certainly will be one of those. If you want to come over and join us.
- [06:43]
Jeff O'Neill
All right, Rebecca. Weirdly, even a shorter synopsis than Bartleby the Scrivener, which is manifestly about not doing things.
- [06:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, and so much weirder. Bartleby the Scrivener. Old man in the Sea. This is pretty straightforward, but as you would put it, simple but not easy. This is a story about an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago. He has gone 84 days without a catch. When he finally lands a huge marlin way out in the Gulf Stream. He spends three, three days and nights fighting the fish. It's larger than his skiff. It probably weighs 1500 pounds. And he eventually reels it in close enough to strike it with a harpoon and lash it to the skiff. Throughout the fight and his arduous journey back, sharks are attacking the marlin because it's just trailing along in the water next to him, and they are taking out sizable chunks. But then later, they attack it in a pack and strip it down to bare bones. Just heartbreaking stuff. Santiago arrives back home after this three day, three night battle, weary but not defeated, which Hemingway tells us over and over. And he's greeted by his young friend Manoline, who comes to bring him coffee the next morning. And they make plans to fish again. And that's.
- [07:56]
Jeff O'Neill
That's it. That's it.
- [07:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
The Old man in the Sea.
- [07:58]
Jeff O'Neill
You can read this in an hour if you hustle. I guess I. I would encourage people not to hustle. There is something.
- [08:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
Don't hustle.
- [08:06]
Jeff O'Neill
Hemingway style can lead itself to reading quickly. And that's one of the strange paradoxes, is as spare as it can be, it's also quite beautiful. And you can just. It's so frictionless that you can just sort of take it in. It's an interesting candidate to do our first sort of dedicated close reading segment in Office Hours because it's notoriously resistant to it. Like, you've really got to squint, much like Santiago is looking for bird sign and, like, slight differences in the air and water. That's kind of what you have to do with Hemingway to see what's going on, because it is so subtle and it's manifestly about omitting things, which we're going to talk about here in a little bit as well. It's so fascinating to think about Hemingway's career because you and I, people of our age and older, come to Hemingway, where the legend of Hemingway is full formed. But it very much wasn't even late in his career. This is his last great work. Hemingway himself said, it's the best thing I've ever written and the best thing I ever will write. It's the only title that's cited in his Nobel Prize Award specifically. And it came out just a couple of years before. And so it's hard to realize that at this moment. He had been lauded in the 20s and 30s, but his career was very much waned. Not even waning. It was waned by the time he did this. And if this book doesn't happen, I think our sense of Hemingway is much more in the line of, I don't know, like John Does Passos or, you know, he was very. Or. Or not even Fitzgerald, because Fitzgerald has a monumental work. The Great Gatsby earlier, and the Great Gatsby has lived longer. I don't know that people would be coming to the Sun Also Rises or fell well to arms in the way they do now without this late work. Rebecca, is that your sense of it, too, when you're looking at the backstory of this particular book and how it came to be?
- [09:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think that's right. And the origins of the Old man and the Sea are from a 1936 piece that Hemingway wrote for Esquire called On the Blue Water a Gulf Stream Letter. And in that, he's trying to explain the appeal of Gulf Stream fishing to a friend who's really into game hunting. And the friend is like, dude, I don't get the appeal of being in a boat and little fish when you could have the adrenaline rush of taking down an elephant. And Hemingway writes that letter to him and I thought did a really beautiful job of trying to help him experience or understand what it's like for all of the senses to be out on the Gulf Stream like that. There's a Hemingway Library edition of the book that you can get that has that 1936 piece in the back. Really helpful to have that material. So he. He drafts this in 1936, Esquire, publishes it, and then basically it's in the drawer and simmering on the back burners of Hemingway's mind while the Spanish Civil War is happening and then World War II, and Hemingway is, you know, living through and working through both of those. He doesn't come back to this story until 1950. It's like a lot of things could have gone sideways that would have prevented this from ever coming out into the world. And I think it's a really interesting contrast to somebody's career like Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby, where that book flopped while he was a live and Fitzgerald, as you can hear in the very first episode of this podcast, he died thinking it was a failure. And something happens that resurrects it. That of course could have happened to Hemingway if this had, you know, just been buried before he died. But it's so unlikely and that it comes out. It really cements his legacy. This came out in 1952, as you said, it's the last of his works to be published. And then he died in 1961. So this is like the capstone on Hemingway's career. And in many ways I think his as he thought, his greatest work.
- [11:43]
Jeff O'Neill
I also this is something you and I are interested in from the nuts and bolts of publishing and distribution and how things are put together. I think it's wildly important to know that it was published in Life magazine concurrently with the book, where you could get it for 20 cents. I didn't find these prices is a great find by you. I didn't think to look for this, so I knew it was out there and was available. And if you subscribe to Life magazine, which along with Time were the it's hard to overestimate how important those magazines were at this particular cultural moment. More than 5 million in the first print copies of Life sold out to the point where it was bootlegged like you were People were like making photocopies and getting it around. It was a sensation at the time.
- [12:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
This episode is brought to you by Quintessential 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. That's the thing about Quince. 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 pieces starting around 50 bucks. It shouldn't work, but it does. Go to quince.comwellred for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's Q U I-n c-e.comwellred thanks to them for sponsoring Today's episode is brought to you by 11 reader.
- [13:39]
Jeff O'Neill
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- [13:44]
Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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- [14:39]
Jeff O'Neill
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- [14:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
Just go to bookriot.com 11reader Again, that's bookriot.com 11reader and thanks again to 11reader for sponsoring this episode. You're probably driving, working out or doing chores right now. Quick tip. TikTok isn't just entertainment, it's where I find fast practical advice for real life. Download TikTok now. Yeah, and that's kind of the opposite of what happens with short stories that are published today. Many times the short stories for well known authors. We just interviewed Louise Erdrich for the Book Riot podcast come out in the New Yorker or a magazine like that first and then a year or two or even decades later those stories get collected and put into a book. It's very rare that an author gets a novella length short story published by itself, which this was. This 80 something page story comes out by itself in a standalone hardcover that sold for $3 in 1952. That's about $36 today. So inflation has kept up with hardcover pricing. But it was only that copy of Life magazine which was available at the exact same time. You didn't have to wait until like the paperback came out or until some exclusivity period for the hardco over it came out at exactly the same time. 20 cents, which is about 250 today. So much more affordable. And Hemingway was stoked for this because it meant that so Many more people were going to be able to read his story. People who wouldn't have been able to afford three bucks or $36 today on the print copy of the novel got to read it in Life magazine. And that also contributes to, like, the legend of Hemingway, that it's possible to become such a legend because 5 million people are reading your story in two weeks. And that's just not a thing that happens today.
- [16:37]
Jeff O'Neill
I had this for you. We're going to play Make Rebecca guess something. So, Rebecca, I want you to guess. This is a copy of that Life. I'm looking on ebay right now. Old man in the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Complete new book, first publication, Life magazine, September 1, 1952. It's not graded or anything, but it's like, a little dinged around the edges, like it's been lived and read. But it's a usable copy, but not pristine by any sense of the word. Would you like to guess how much it is to buy right now? It's not an auction. It's a Buy it now feature on ebay right now.
- [17:08]
Rebecca Schinsky
Can I ask you any questions about it or do you just want me to take a flyer?
- [17:13]
Jeff O'Neill
I will ask what question you going to ask, and I will decide if I'm going to allow it after I know what you're going to ask.
- [17:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
Do you think I'm more likely to err on the high side or the low side?
- [17:24]
Jeff O'Neill
I will not be answering that.
- [17:26]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay.
- [17:27]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, I'll say this. 5 million is a lot of magazines.
- [17:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
That's where I was gonna start. 5 million is a lot of copies. So these weren't rare to begin with, but it's been 75 years.
- [17:37]
Jeff O'Neill
It's been 75 years.
- [17:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
So they might be kind of rare now, but copies of the Old man and the Sea as a book are not rare or hard to come by at all.
- [17:47]
Jeff O'Neill
I'll give you one more hint. I would think about. I might think about buying this.
- [17:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like, you might think, okay.
- [17:53]
Jeff O'Neill
And, you know, I'm not a collector. People might not know. This is not a. I mean, you know, I care about books or what, but I'm not like. Yeah. Anyway.
- [17:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
And you're also not one to, like, splash out on a luxury item just because.
- [18:03]
Jeff O'Neill
No.
- [18:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
So that's helpful. $250.
- [18:08]
Jeff O'Neill
A very good guess. 1 69.99 right now.
- [18:11]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay. If you want it to be a collection.
- [18:14]
Jeff O'Neill
Cheap as 95. It looks like for one. That. And it looks like a signed, one assigned version. Again, I don't know about the provenance so buyer beware. Okay, that's 500 bucks.
- [18:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Okay, that's pretty cool.
- [18:29]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, so it's pretty cool. That is an affordable piece of literary history to get for 150 to 200 bucks. Life Mag. I mean, it's. This is an item, and it's got a wonderful picture of him at the. At the. On the COVID as you might.
- [18:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
It does. I was gonna point that out. I was looking at. For the COVID of the magazine when I was doing research here. And the COVID of Life magazine just says Hemingway. A new story, the original of the book also just says Hemingway. They don't have Ernest on them anywhere. Like, he was at Beyonce level. Single name recognition.
- [19:04]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, it's incredible stuff. If you meet anyone named Hemingway, you immediately think of Ernest Hemingway. I mean, there's. There's no. There's no getting around that. At the same time, I think the other thing that goes into what these are signs of that Life agreed to this, that they priced the novella this way, that it was a novella at all suggests it shows. And Hemingway talks about this and other people have that. Editors and agents and people he showed it to early were super jazzed about this. Like, notoriously difficult in culture and books to know if something is going to move. But people are like, we've got something here. And Rebecca, they were right. They had something here. They had something.
- [19:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, in addition to those 5 million copies of Life magazine selling out, the first print run of the book does really well. And it was highly acclaimed just immediately. You can still find the original New York Times review of the book, which is like, this is Ernest Hemingway at his best. William Faulkner also reviewed it. He said, this is his best time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us. I mean, his and my contemporaries, William
- [20:05]
Jeff O'Neill
Faulkner, who also like Hemingway, they feuded. So that really means something. As you know, my favorite kind of praise is through gritted teeth.
- [20:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [20:15]
Jeff O'Neill
So this is very much a they. They couldn't help but say, it's awesome.
- [20:18]
Rebecca Schinsky
He wraps it up with this time he discovered God, a creator.
- [20:23]
Jeff O'Neill
Like, wow. What does your let's settle down radar do with that?
- [20:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
If it were coming from anybody other than William Faulkner, I think that would flag my let's settle down. But I take this to mean that, like Faulkner, especially because he didn't like Hemingway and was not effusive as a person or a writer, this is really significant. Also, it's been competitive for writers. It stays competitive for writers. Like, even if they had liked each other, there would have Been competition in, you know, know, namespace and for book sales. And anytime two writers of this caliber are kind of up against each other and one of them sees something in the other that makes them say, you know what? Like, he just did it better than I did. This is the best that any of us is ever going to do. Like, generationally, this is the best. I want to sit up and pay attention to that because that takes humility and that's really important.
- [21:17]
Jeff O'Neill
On the other hand, I will say Faulkner had won the Nobel Prize in 1949, so he got there first, so maybe he was in a mood to little.
- [21:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
Welcome to the club, Ernie.
- [21:26]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, just, you know, he. He had some humility to spare.
- [21:30]
Rebecca Schinsky
Do you think anyone called Ernest Hemingway Ernie? I feel like he might punch you in the throat for that.
- [21:36]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean, I also possibly. But remember, we're pre Muppets. I think the Muppets have done something to the name Ernie because, like Ernie Banks, the baseball player, that was the. That was the dominant Ernie before the Muppets. And that was like masculinity. Baseball, which is all over. Old man in the Sea, which I had forgotten how much DiMaggio in baseball. There's an Old man in the Sea. I don't know if I said this, but Hemingway said he thought it was the best writing he'd ever done and would ever do. This is in the hard to quantify, but people have heard of the Old man in the Sea. Rebecca. But that sounds reductive, but it matters like it just by itself with Hemingway, it feels like a cultural document to its detriment, that people feel like they know what the gist is and they're both right and wrong about that. But it has a life outside of any experience of the writing of it or the reading of it, or even the Hemingwayness of it. It is, to 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 it's variations on. It's quite different in some regards to the spare, stripped down prose of especially something like Hills 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. They're 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. You know, needless words is actually one of her dictums. But 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, humanness, 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 the. 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, 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.
- [23:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's deceptively simple, you know, like, because the language is so straightforward, because the sentences are uncomplicated. When I read Hemingway for the first time, I think it was my freshman year of high school and it wasn't Old man in 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 know. Know what Fitzgerald was doing. But a lot of people I remember took Hemingway and struggled through it.
- [24:40]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, it's not as easy as it looks.
- [24:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
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.
- [25:00]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. All right, let's get into a little Hemingway backstory. We could do, you know, a miniseries 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. You born, born 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 cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. Spent 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 don't have. 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. arming during World War I. 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. Spent 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 despatchos and other people. Like Siebel go to Paris. Then he leaves Paris to move to Key West. By the. 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 19. 28, 29.
- [27:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
This is like one of the things that I was marveling at with Fitzgerald too, when we did Great Gatsby is 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.
- [27:34]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes, definitely. Yes.
- [27:36]
Rebecca Schinsky
Like whiskey drinking. With Hemingway, it was rum, but like drinking stoic doodley, 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.
- [27:58]
Jeff O'Neill
He went through. I mean, in the decade before Old man in the scene, he went through a fairly heavy fallow period, wrote a couple 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 US army for basically valor and war reportage. But then his friends started dying, and Maxwell Perkins, to whom Old Man City 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. But other people were dying. Dos Passos was dying like his friends were dying. And he was depressed, and he didn't know if his life had amounted to much. He didn't know if I was ever gonna 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? Like, he actually does. You know, he actually does, like, some of these things that the facade does. It 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, yes, but he was also introverted and thoughtful and complicated, to be sure, at the same time.
- [29:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
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 or 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. 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 in this was really fun to see.
- [30:29]
Jeff O'Neill
And not only doesn't fork to close 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. You 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. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow things in his writing. This is 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, saying it directly, or like having being able to point with your fingers like, this is the moment where I started feeling that thing. We'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.
- [32:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
It puts me in mind of our shared favorite book from last year, Audition by Katie Kitamura, and the general vibe of 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. 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.
- [32:58]
Jeff O'Neill
He's extraordinarily interested and have this down to what it's about here in a minute. Maybe this is 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 the. They call it called the line is the purity of the line of the matador. Right. We're 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 expertise and goes to it. And Tiantago is a kind of matador is interesting. Right. And why the animal is the. The. 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, can you. 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. That's about art and writing and everything that's going on at the same time,
- [34:01]
Rebecca Schinsky
in addition to mastery of writing and developing that art, like Hemingway was an accomplished angler.
- [34:06]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [34:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
In the summer of 1935 in Bimini, he was the first person to bring in a bluefin tuna that was unscathed by Shar 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, the fish is on the line and it's a heavy rope and he's turning. He's constantly turning and putting the rope over one shoulder and leaning into it and. 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 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.
- [35:11]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. So what's like this. What is all about so big ideas in Reed experience like you have here. It's epic and harrowing and yet it's a dude on a boat, right?
- [35:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [35:20]
Jeff O'Neill
You have later. What are the great fishing novels I have. 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.
- [35:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
It is epic stuff. Like.
- [35:36]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [35:36]
Rebecca Schinsky
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. 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.
- [36:30]
Jeff O'Neill
Can I try out something on you, Rebecca? Because I was thinking about this. 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 is it's kind of. It's a riveting yarn on its surface level, if you don't get any below the waves at all. I think the idea of 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, yes, maybe there's not symbolism in a direct way and 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. If 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 think that's right. I will not entertain any other way of thinking about this.
- [37:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's right and it's helpful. And I think that gets us. Helps us get outside of the like 9th grade English class reading of what does the fish symbolize?
- [37:31]
Jeff O'Neill
What did the fish symbolize? Right. Yeah.
- [37:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
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? 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 1500 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 in 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. 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.
- [38:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, the away from the things of man is. Is really on display. And how stripped. If you strip away some of those other things, then what emerges I think is interesting. You talk 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. Is a good shorthand for a caricature version of Hemingway. I don't find that to be the case here. Clearly, you know, we get a whole like 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.
- [39:39]
Rebecca Schinsky
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. Like I'm a person who spends a lot of time like 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, have become so separated from who he actually was calcified
- [40:21]
Jeff O'Neill
and one sided and what they.
- [40:22]
Rebecca Schinsky
What the writing's actually like.
- [40:24]
Jeff O'Neill
I meant to say this in the who this is and at some point when we if and when we get to other Hemingway's like that have like ladies at all in it, we will need to get more and 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, it's not directly at stake though I think it is. 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. It's not, it's not smooth sailing for a contemporary understanding, but complicated to say, 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. This 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. That appears here. But on the other hand, as you say, I. I'm so glad you said this is about generosity and connection. Like he's trying to relate to his ward, his protege, Fisher boy. He'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. The small birds. Right. He feels so bad for the little birds.
- [42:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. There's.
- [42:30]
Jeff O'Neill
And how fragile they are.
- [42:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
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 and between Santiago and Manolyn, 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 are 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 so saying, fish, I love you and respect you very much, but I will see you dead before this day ends. 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. 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 of fish in 84 days.
- [43:38]
Jeff O'Neill
Isn't that. I mean, I had forgotten it been that he's on a. He's one of the great dry spells. And he. This. I think I have this in my quotes that he has. He admits to himself and to the fish eventually that he's gone too far out. Like he has gone to extreme because he's desperate. He'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, great renowned fisher person who seems to be long in the tooth. He's just sort of trying. He has to buy coffee. Desperate, God's sake.
- [44:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [44:13]
Jeff O'Neill
So that desperation really comes into to play here. Let's see. Yeah, long sentence description. You say heroes and limit. There are heroes and myths, but also the limits of heroes and 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, supra text. So 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 relating what they've heard Joe DiMaggio doing. It's like early September of 1950, because the mandolin and Santiago were talking about what DiMaggio is doing and what he hasn't done. DiMaggio, of course, the, the great hitter for the New York Yankees who had had maybe an unbreakable record 56 game hitting streak, probably will never be broken. People often talk about as one of the most unbreakable records in sports, a myth, mythic person of himself who his own father was a fisher person. And of course the most famous of all fisher people, the big JC that's all over this. At the same time, Hemingway's a fisher person. And then mandolin is idolizing Santiago. So there's kind of a. 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 sacrifice. 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.
- [45:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
And St. James is known as Santiago in Spanish. You can, you can hike the Camino de Santiago to Santiago de Compostela where St. James is buried. And there's all of this. 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, on your packs now to, you know, 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, like, legacies of fishing and also sort of the mythology and the symbolism of fishing.
- [46:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I also have. I mean, one of the questions that this book asked that we don't. We'll get to when we get to the immortal question our ass segment. But what in the hell are we to make of the difference between humans and the natural world? Like, literally, what are we supposed to do? Because it's conf. 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 really, you know, kind of any, like, Genesis, humans are the masters of nature, but also not. You know, you are my brothers, and I'm going to kill you. And I love porpoises and the dolphin fish, but also. So, 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.
- [47:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I agree with that. I think that he's. That's kind of the humility that I was talking about, that there's a. There's not any, like, joy of domination between Santiago and this fish, and there's no desire to dominate.
- [47:38]
Jeff O'Neill
Right.
- [47:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's. And that also runs counter to the mythology that we have about Hemingway and that whole, like, manly man presentation that
- [47:45]
Jeff O'Neill
this, like, trophy hunting, like, modern trophy hunting, is, like. You pay a lot of money to bag a line on a reserve. So you can get the picture of it with, like, you and your paramilitary gear.
- [47:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
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. And Hemingway's like, no, dude, it's out there in this boat. You're just you in the sea and the fish. And that's what. 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 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. K Pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side
- [49:09]
Jeff O'Neill
and participate in McDonald's while supplies last. It's the Paradise Podcast. I am your host, Ryan Michelle Bathe
- [49:15]
Rebecca Schinsky
with my husband Sterling. What's up? Join us here on Hulu and Hulu
- [49:20]
Jeff O'Neill
on Disney where we'll discuss discuss each
- [49:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
episode with the cast and crew of Paradise. I'll be getting all the secrets from Dan Fogelman, James Marsden, Shailene Woodley, Julianne Nicholson and Sterling Kelby Brown. Paradise, the official podcast is now streaming
- [49:36]
Jeff O'Neill
and stream paradise on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. Pros.
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
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Jeff O'Neill
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Rebecca Schinsky
shippingterms subject to change.
- [50:11]
Jeff O'Neill
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? This 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.
- [51:11]
Rebecca Schinsky
There's that like old saw that most of us have probably heard that like they shouldn't really. They don't call it catching, they call it fishing.
- [51:18]
Jeff O'Neill
Fishing, right.
- [51:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
But it's about, it's truly about the attempt and like the patience and the waiting and all of the things that go into it then and the kind of the practice of it. Like 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, you know, serendipity, luck, what's going to happen. And you like, you can't escape being subject to that. And you have to continue practicing the thing. Like 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. Out.
- [52:03]
Jeff O'Neill
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 have fixed 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 on 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, 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, of course. Jesus. The lion. Aslan Narnia. That's, that's, you know, that would be a little bit later, but that he is still drinking of a. He's still dreaming of a frontier, of a different kind of predator. Is he. The lion is. He's subject to the lion. I'm not sure what to do with it, Rebecca, but it would make a good 9th grade English essay if someone.
- [53:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, you know that there are dissertations about, about all of that, right?
- [53:19]
Jeff O'Neill
Stray thoughts.
- [53:20]
Rebecca Schinsky
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. Like 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, you know, 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.
- [53:48]
Jeff O'Neill
But when this giant mythological fish is sort of like. It is the sea. It's like the heart of the sea. Like the jewel from Titanic. Like, this is this, this is the soul of the sea I'm wrestling with. Like, like figuratively, literally.
- [53:59]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. Hemingway's grandson Sean wrote the intro to the edition that I read and he cites the Old man and 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. 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 Roll runs through it? I can't even think of anything else that's about fishing.
- [54:29]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of writing. I mean, like John Girac. Yeah, My, my, there's a lot of non fiction, but in terms of novels, I don't have anything that comes to, 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, okay. 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.
- [54:56]
Rebecca Schinsky
Well, actually, Sean Hemingway.
- [54:57]
Jeff O'Neill
All right, I'm just saying here. We can't like, literally. Literally.
- [55:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
All right. The court of rightness sees your objection and recognizes it.
- [55:09]
Jeff O'Neill
Okay.
- [55:11]
Rebecca Schinsky
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. And I'm 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.
- [56:05]
Jeff O'Neill
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. Like, 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?
- [56:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [56:47]
Jeff O'Neill
So he is beyond the pale of the known. And that's important to remember. But that my thoughts. You didn't bring an extra. You're gonna fish for your food. But he didn't think he was gonna be out there for days holding onto a 1500 pound Martian.
- [56:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
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 when. 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 Cheryl Strayed going out to hike in wild, where she's never laced up a pair of boots, and her pack has £500 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?
- [58:06]
Jeff O'Neill
As you were talking, I was remembering a perfect storm.
- [58:09]
Rebecca Schinsky
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [58:10]
Jeff O'Neill
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 it reads like a survival story, right? This. 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's. 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. And it becomes something beyond the, you know, economic necessity, because at some point, he catches another marlin on the other line, and he choose 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. The trial. A trial of will. Well, 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. The value of it, right? At the same time, I don't. I would just never stop barfing between the movements of the waves. And the nausea. This whole thing, eating the raw fish, the sunburn alone, you know, they even talks about the skill skin cancer that's forming on this guy. Like it's really hard out there for a ginger like you and emotion stick prone like me. I think we'd probably be the world's worst duo to land the 1500 pound marlin using only line and like dolphin fish.
- [59:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
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 another day.
- [59:45]
Jeff O'Neill
You would turn into a slim Jim. You would just be a burnt, crispy, dried up husk of meat.
- [59:49]
Rebecca Schinsky
Live to fish another day. Let's like we don't, we don't need this.
- [59:53]
Jeff O'Neill
My own stray thoughts are I've never seen a person more need of one of those dofl encounter things you could do at resort shorts. Do you think we have this story if he gets to like run around with like dolphins that just get a
- [60:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
hug from a manatee?
- [60:04]
Jeff O'Neill
Just kind of see, you know, kind of a different level of communing with nature and conservation. It's so interesting to think about this. I always think about overfishing and how that even this fish is mythic. Like it's within the bounds of the possible. But I don't know if people know this but like you can't catch fish like this anymore because there's so much overfishing like in, in these days. In Hemingway's day to early fishing, Leviathan still roamed the Caribbean where you could land these giant fish which just there's so much fish in 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 capturing.
- [60:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
It feels like it's out of time.
- [60:40]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes. The market rate for marlin, sword 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 scale.
- [60:51]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [60:52]
Jeff O'Neill
There's only like a thousand pounds. There's a 300 bucks.
- [60:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah. Three bucks a pound now.
- [60:56]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, yeah. 1950, 300 bucks would be 3,000. It's because that's like 30 cents. A 30 cents today you could have a thousand pounds. So it's, I get, and I think that also suggests 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.
- [61:19]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [61:20]
Jeff O'Neill
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. What did this do to commercial fishing? As like you know, we read about Jurassic park is like a bunch of people came paleontologists or like with the big Lebowsi comes out and everyone is drinking White Rush. Like these things can matter over time. This is the history of Florida different without Hemingway himself and Old man in the Sea specifically. I don't know this, but this is one of my straight thoughts. That's why they go in the straight thoughts.
- [62:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
This experience in this book is not a great ad for a move to Florida, but the Hemingway of it all might be.
- [62:11]
Jeff O'Neill
I mean there's Hemingway of this all.
- [62:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
A lot of tourism built up around Hemingway, especially in Key west now.
- [62:18]
Jeff O'Neill
All right, let's do some quotes. You pulled the number one quote on Goodreads, Rebecca. What? What is it?
- [62:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
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.
- [62:39]
Jeff O'Neill
I'm going back to our old pal the the unlucky Dane. The readiness is all. There's special providence in the fall. 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.
- [62:52]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [62:53]
Jeff O'Neill
Where else you want to go? I have some. You have some. We can ping pong back and forth.
- [62:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
I may not be as strong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution. Pretty good.
- [63:01]
Jeff O'Neill
Good tattoo. I have many tricks and I have re resolution. Could that. Would that be our literary quote?
- [63:06]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's a good one that 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 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.
- [63:34]
Jeff O'Neill
I had that. I'm glad you had this. I was going to pull that out too. It's just beautiful.
- [63:38]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [63:39]
Jeff O'Neill
Pretty. It's pretty. Rebecca, I don't say that's pretty to it.
- [63:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, yeah, it is. It's gorgeous.
- [63:44]
Jeff O'Neill
No man is an island. No man is alone. Like literally saying, you're not alone.
- [63:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
And it is silly not to hope. He thought, besides, I believe it is a sin.
- [63:55]
Jeff O'Neill
So much Christian stuff. Again, Catholics and like is very much in the culture that Santiago is name and he's participating in. But Hemingway does not downplay it. In fact, he gives it specificity. I have. 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. We 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. And 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. That. And Santiago was taken right up to it. If this was a 5, this was a 1501 pound marlin. I think Santiago is dead. It doesn't work.
- [65:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
It's right at the edges of his capacity. That's right.
- [65:44]
Jeff O'Neill
I also have. I should not have gone so out 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 have liked the way I hit him in the brain, talking about one of the sharks he fended off. It 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 burns, bone spurs that kept him. 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.
- [66:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. These are not godlike bodies. Yeah.
- [66:44]
Jeff O'Neill
He's human. Overcoming the limitations of the. The physical body, which I thought was cool. I think this was to me the. The subtlest explanation of what expertise can afford you. Santiago thinks. 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. So there's. There's that. Anything else you wanted to get here?
- [67:37]
Rebecca Schinsky
No. I mean, we could do this all day for being 80 pages long. There are so many wonderful lines.
- [67:43]
Jeff O'Neill
I have my close read section for the office hours. Should I tease that or just save it?
- [67:48]
Rebecca Schinsky
Let's just save it.
- [67:49]
Jeff O'Neill
Let's just save it. It's about sharks. I guess I'll say enough about that. Rebecca, is this for you?
- [67:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes.
- [67:54]
Jeff O'Neill
Why? Might this be for you?
- [67:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes, it's 80 pages long. It's for you. Yes. Right 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 gonna move anyway because I'm not gonna get up and make noise while a big, much needed nap was happening. 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.
- [68:43]
Jeff O'Neill
Like, things of this. 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. 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? Is 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.
- [69:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
No, I mean, it's kind of all of them and kind of none of them.
- [69:18]
Jeff O'Neill
It's not. One doesn't jump out to me.
- [69:21]
Rebecca Schinsky
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.
- [69:33]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes.
- [69:35]
Rebecca Schinsky
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? How are we to make sense of our relationship to the natural world? But that seems to be what Hemingway is really dealing with.
- [70:14]
Jeff O'Neill
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. 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 like. One of the reasons that he chooses not to cut the line is this feels like a life's purpose. To have a purpose. This. I think this idea goes all the way back to Aristotle of. Of hap. You know, happiness is getting what you want and keeping it. But it's also of using your skills and strengths at the highest level. Right. Find. 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 songs. 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.
- [71:25]
Rebecca Schinsky
It. Yeah.
- [71:25]
Jeff O'Neill
So that's a. What is a good life to me.
- [71:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah. That's. I think that's right on.
- [71:29]
Jeff O'Neill
Are we sure this is my art and writing?
- [71:31]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, despite Hemingway's insistent that. 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. I'm. And I'm gonna go with yes.
- [71:51]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. The. 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.
- [72:04]
Rebecca Schinsky
Hemingway would be friction maxing. Yeah.
- [72:06]
Jeff O'Neill
Right. Which could you get most of the gist from watching a. The signal adaptation.
- [72:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
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.
- [72:34]
Jeff O'Neill
Sentences doing thing that only sentences like this is sentence work here, Rebecca. Let's keep it to this sentence.
- [72:40]
Rebecca Schinsky
I agree 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 audiobook is excerpts from an audio journal that she kept while she was out in the wild on camping trips and like canoeing through the Grand Canyon and reflecting on a recent end of a relationship. And I kind of was like, well, if we had to, if we have to do anything, a heartbreak style, like audio journal from Santiago is the only thing I might be interested in. But I think this is a pretty perfect work of literature.
- [73:19]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I think a really good audiobook could be cool. Maybe maybe one of those cases where one of those enhanced audiobooks you get a little waves and maybe you get some landscape and it could be cool.
- [73:29]
Rebecca Schinsky
I don't know. Nick Offerman and let's do it.
- [73:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I didn't 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, let's bolt through these. Rebecca.
- [73:42]
Rebecca Schinsky
Well, if you're reading this along and you're like, how deep is a fathom? I had to Google it. A fathom is 6ft or 2 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 1800ft. So a third of a mile. That's so much reeling in for a 1500 pound fish.
- [74:08]
Jeff O'Neill
You've got the water and your cramped hand and a marlin fighting for its life on the other side of that.
- [74:14]
Rebecca Schinsky
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, Kennan Rawlings who wrote the Yearling and Thomas Wolfe. So like just a hell of a run and probably beat only by and contemporary publishing Sunny Meta 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 Sunny Meta, 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.
- [75:02]
Jeff O'Neill
Let's see, I'll do a couple mine. I talked about him losing a half decade of writing in depression and 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 and who was the French publisher of Ulysses, was looking for ways to get it into the U.S. it 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 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 if this sounds like a Hemingway thing to do, is to smuggle Ulysses 100 to the US 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. No 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 be places where he get an accident. 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. Yeah, totally Doc Browned himself. You know, he almost invented the flux capacitor by when he was taking a dump one night and didn't know how to operate the toilet.
- [76:28]
Rebecca Schinsky
So funny. The largest collection of his notes and papers are at the JFK library in Boston, which is kind of a strange place, you know, at first look for Hemingway 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.
- [76:57]
Jeff O'Neill
Unbelievable. I don't think I remember that. That idea of grace under pressure 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. They bust a tail and. 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 lar. Some warehouse in Cuba has Hemingway stuff that might be a gold.
- [77:33]
Rebecca Schinsky
They're off with wherever the paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
- [77:37]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's it for now. Got a lot of those. Would you like to go to Hot Takes Rebecca?
- [77:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
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. 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 us. Can we separate the art from the artist kind of thing. But like 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 like social acceptance that Hemingway was for better and for worse. But I just had to say something about like, it's so. It is so tingly and complex. We're not going to say it is
- [78:48]
Jeff O'Neill
not without 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 wants said Shakespeare is 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. 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. And 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 kinds of things. What depths are we willing to let them plumb that are 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, 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.
- [79:57]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [79:57]
Jeff O'Neill
Because of that circumscription. My 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.
- [80:10]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah.
- [80:11]
Jeff O'Neill
Read alikes recommendation books inspired by and other artistic experience that may scratch the same. It's Rebecca, what'd you have?
- [80:18]
Rebecca Schinsky
I mean, Hemingway is really the only true read alike for Hemingway. But as I thought about this, I think James Salter is a founder.
- [80:25]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Very much in the shadow.
- [80:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
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. Just there's a rugged old school masculinity to Salter as well.
- [80:41]
Jeff O'Neill
Hunters are a great pull. I think that's one. And I think it's related in a lot of ways. Like a young man in a plane, A young man in the sky is maybe a good way of thinking about Hunter.
- [80:50]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's like a more refined, like high literary version. 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.
- [81:23]
Jeff O'Neill
Out on a boat.
- [81:24]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yep. Which came out last year. Yeah. True story about a married couple stranded in the ocean after their boat sank. 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 them their morale up. Like a great read. Harrowing stuff. Kind of depends on what you're looking for from a read alike.
- [81:49]
Jeff O'Neill
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 well writer. I 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 some of the writers. It really is a bloody wonderful. If I got that review from Hemingway, I think I would dissipate into atoms of.
- [82:27]
Rebecca Schinsky
Of you just hang it up that day like we're done. We're done.
- [82:31]
Jeff O'Neill
I will say is quite good. I would. I would love to know if there's a. I can look this up up if there is a great audiobook version of this now an underrated gem of a book.
- [82:41]
Rebecca Schinsky
You've recommended that to me in the past and I still haven't gotten to it. But I think it's a contender.
- [82:45]
Jeff O'Neill
I would like it. I think you.
- [82:46]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think I would too. I think it's a good zero to well read contender.
- [82:50]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Cocktail party crib sheet. Three to five takeaways. Rebecca, what do we have?
- [82:53]
Rebecca Schinsky
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. 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.
- [83:13]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Mine is quite simple here. Right. Hemingway's writing is not what you think it is. It just. It just isn't a final beat or zero to well read score. Each one gets a score of 1 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. Not impossible to say that. So again it's 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 struggle with this.
- [83:56]
Rebecca Schinsky
I'm gonna go.
- [83:56]
Jeff O'Neill
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 it.
- [84:03]
Rebecca Schinsky
But it does feel like a real capstone to the Hemingway. Yeah, I think eight. Eight and a half.
- [84:07]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Somewhere in there, readability approaches 10. If not a 10.
- [84:13]
Rebecca Schinsky
I think it's a 10. Like, it's what would make it more readable.
- [84:18]
Jeff O'Neill
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.
- [84:34]
Rebecca Schinsky
All right, fine.
- [84:35]
Jeff O'Neill
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.
- [84:43]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yes. It feels relevant. It feels very. Just po.
- [84:50]
Jeff O'Neill
It feels relevant in the way that, like, myths and tall, like, they are and aren't relevant.
- [84:54]
Rebecca Schinsky
Yeah, I think the infinity symbol is the answer to this question.
- [84:58]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. It's like, can we do a 5/10? I don't know enough. They're like, the square root of negative 2 isn't one of those, like, an impossible number?
- [85:05]
Rebecca Schinsky
We need Douglas Adams to show up and invent us a number for this. Yeah.
- [85:09]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I think we just invented a new rating. Let's do with the square root of negative 2 for the current relevance of central question. It's sort of. It is above and beyond and around that book. 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 it's. They know what it is that they don't actually pick it up. Like, what is this book about? So I'm not sure.
- [85:32]
Rebecca Schinsky
Rebecca. I'm gonna go with an 8 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, up after your schooling ended on your own, you get a higher score.
- [85:46]
Jeff O'Neill
O damn 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 of kinds kind of the
- [86:07]
Rebecca Schinsky
o dam for me was in how many times. It was not the book I was expecting it to be.
- [86:11]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah.
- [86:12]
Rebecca Schinsky
So I'm going with a nine. Yeah. Pretty high score here for Hemingway. Who's surprised?
- [86:17]
Jeff O'Neill
Not I'm not as surprised. I'm so I didn't know what your own experience would be reading it. I'm so glad that I loved it. 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 02 well read comm. You can go to patreon.com 02 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 gonna do some close reading of a little section of Old man in the Sea. Thanks so much to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. And Rebecca, what number what what are we proud to be?
- [86:55]
Rebecca Schinsky
We are proud to be a member of the Airwave Podcast Network.
- [86:58]
Jeff O'Neill
Yes, we are. Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks everybody. We'll talk to you next time.
- [87:02]
Rebecca Schinsky
See y' all next time. Foreign.
- [87:11]
Jeff O'Neill
We recap the week's tech news with the smartest people in the business.
- [87:16]
Rebecca Schinsky
Joining me this Sunday, Kathy Gellis, attorney
- [87:18]
Jeff O'Neill
at law Harper Reed, AI guru and Brian McCullough from the tech Brew Ride
- [87:23]
Rebecca Schinsky
Home, we'll talk about the big meta social media decision. Is it the end of the line for social media? We'll talk about AI and why you should give your AI agent some free
- [87:35]
Jeff O'Neill
time and a whole lot more. Look Forward at TWiT TV or wherever you get your podcasts.