SOURCE: Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Extemporaneities.” Salmagundi, nos. 128-129 (fall-winter 2000-01): 42-7.

In the following essay, Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America's best-known writers, reflects on the archetypal qualities and origins of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

When his mediocre novel Across the River and into the Trees was savaged by critics, few would have predicted the comeback Hemingway would make with The Old Man and the Sea, an exemplary, concise modern classic about courage that may well have assured his reputation and won him the Nobel Prize. The plot of the 1952 novel is simple: an old fisherman, eighty-four days without a catch, captures a huge fish in a titanic two-and-a-half day struggle; he ties it to his small skiff, only to lose it again, after a second heroic fight, to the jaws of Caribbean sharks. It is a characteristic Hemingway fiction: a man's confrontation with an...