The Old Man and the Sea 老人与海
作者： Ernest
出版社：SCRIBNER 1995年05月
简介：
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that "no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords." Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame:
Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.
If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions." Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career. --James Marcus
作者简介：
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899,and began his writing career for The Kansas City Star in 1917.During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the halian front but was invalided home, having been seriously wounded while serving with the infanty. In 1921 t lemingway settled in Paris, where he became part of the expa-triate circle of Gertrude Stein, f:. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound,and Ford Madox Ford. With the appearance of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway became not only the voice of the "lost generation" but the preeminent writer of his time. This was followed bv his novel of the Italian front, A Farewell to
Arms (1929). In the 1930s, Hemilngway setted in Key West,and hiter in Cuba, but he traveled widely---to Spain, Italy, and Africa. Later he reported on the Spanish Civil War, which be-
came the background for his brilliant war novel, for Whom the Bell Tolls (1939), hunted U-boats in the Caribbean, and cov-ered the European front during the Second World War. Hem-ingway's most popular work, The Old Alan and the Sea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the ari of narration." One of the most im-portant influences on the development of the short story and
novel in American fiction, i temingway has seized the imagina-tion of the American public like no other twentieth-century au-thor. tie died, by suicide, in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. His other major works include To Have and Have Not (l937),Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), and posthumously, A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dan-gerous Summer (1985), and The Garden of Eden (1986).
