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Te Ao Hou, May 1957, Page 56

serving in the 1914–18 war, returned to newspaper work. His life-long interests in fishing, shooting, ski ing, and the bull ring have supplied much of the raw material of his books, and taken him to many different corners of the world. He now lives in Cuba. Hemingway published his first book before he was twenty-five, and was immediately recognised as an outstanding writer and one of the most influential figures in the field of modern American fiction. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his narrative art as shown in his most recent book, ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ This is the story of an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream. His closest friend was a young boy who loved him and served him like his own son; and his only other interest, now that the days of his youth were far behind him, was baseball. Fishing was his life and his livelihood, and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish. In the early dark of the eighty-fifth day he put out to sea alone, out past the other boats, out of sight of land, out to where the big fish lived in an ocean a mile deep. And there he hooked his fish—a giant marlin eighteen feet long and stronger than a strong man in his prime. For two days and two nights he followed and fought the fish with all the patience and experience that the spent years had left him, and on the third day he won. Then came the sharks. It is a simple tale about an old man, a fish, and a boy. Nothing more. But into it Hemingway has put all the courage, humility, endurance, and suffering that can be contained in one man's life. It is written in a quiet and deliberately restrained prose, but its excitement and terrible suspense make it a book to be read at one sitting. This 1955 edition is a beautiful example of book production, and the excellent black and white illustrations are entirely suitable. Four of Mr Hemingway's earlier novels have been published by Penguin Books and are easily obtainable. They are: ‘Men Without Women’, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, ‘To Have and Have Not’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.—J.C. Sturm.