By the time I read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in high school, I'd already read A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises. Good thing, too, because The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's tersest statement about what it means for a male to live a worthwhile life: live vigorously, test yourself, fight what threatens to destroy you (within and without), and emerged bloodied, but unbowed. If I hadn't been steeped in the author's themes already, I never would have gotten this message from his last, great, but very thin book. As it was, I still had to rely on Cliffs Notes to alert me to the mythic and Christ allusions.<br /><br />This book would have been a daunting adaptation for any movie maker, since most of the important stuff going on is unseen and unspoken. It didn't help that the beefy Spencer Tracy was cast as a near-starving Cuban fisherman. His bulk and vigor contradicts Hemingway's desire to show the depth of character and spiritual strength that can lie within physical frailty. Tracy projects a certain amount of wisdom, but the problem is that he comes across as knowing he's wise, doling out gems from an his life vein of experiences. The power of Hemingway's fisherman was that he was un-self-consciously wise. The combined effect these two incongruities drove me the online Cliffs Notes, 16 years after the first time, to remind me of the mythic and Christ allusions again.<br /><br />If you want to know Hemingway, read his books.