英语读书笔记老人与海book review

The Review Of The old man and the sea

Ernest Hemingway

The old man and the sea

112pp.Foreign Language Press.RMB 10.00

978 7 1190 48895

We all know the famous saying “A MAN CAN BE DESTROYED, BUT NOT DEFEATED”

Through an old fisherman’s struggle against nature, Ernest Hemingway portrays the most magnificent part of the culture of manhood, courage and bravery。

If you want to understand what the novel trying to convey to us,you’d better know some information of Ernest Hemingway and the archetype of Santiago- Gregorio Fuentes and the great friendship between them。

Ernest Hemingway, as one of the greatest literary lights of the 20th century, did more to change the style of English literature than any other writer in the same period. As an unique writer, he wrote in short and declarative sentences, and despite the fact that his works were usually marked by incredible economy of words and descriptions, he was always able to seize the very core of the soul of his characters and present them to the readers in a simple but extremely powerful way. Ernest Hemingway covered both the Spanish civil war and World War I. He subsequently portrays his own experiences in these two wars in his brilliant novels, For

Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. Although these two books immediately established his status in the literary world, it is his timeless novella, the Old Man and the Sea, that eventually help him win the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for literature in1954.

Gregorio Fuentes was born in Canary Islands in1897，his father was a cook on a cargo boat and died of an accident when Fuentes wan still a young boy . Fuentes opted to become a seaman, in honor of his father before him. Although his adoptive father, Don Raul Mediavilla, initially disapproved, he soon taught the young but intensely focused Fuentes the ways of the sea. With his natural skills at seamanship, Fuentes joined a cargo sailing company in Cuba. Fuentes' first encounter with the young literary giant began as a misfortune that became the adventure of his life. The 25-year-old Fuentes, captain of a fishing vessel that regularly traversed the Florida straits between Cuba and the U.S. mainland, was returning from Cuba when he encountered a stranded boat, out of fuel, several nautical miles off the Florida coast. When the occupant of the boat(Hemingway) cried out for help in Spanish, Fuentes came to the rescue. Fuentes towed Hemingway and his boat to the U.S. Dry Tortugas, due west of the Keys. From there Hemingway phoned officials in Key West, his original destination, for further help. As Hemingway departed, the last thing he said to his young Cuban rescuer was "Goodbye, my friend. I'll see you again in Cuba."