And she shared how, in her own work, she searches for the surprising, fleeting moments that seem to contain a character’s whole being to give fictional people the appearance of real life. She discussed how the book’s radical closing gesture elevates memory above all other aspects of the human experience, as the last thing left when one’s strength, pride, and reputation have faded. The novelist Téa Obreht, the author of Inland, addressed that question in a conversation for this series, explaining how Hemingway boils his main character’s entire history down to one inscrutable image. “Why,” he asks himself, after days at sea, “are the lions the main thing that is left?” Even the titular old man, Santiago, is not sure why this moment from his youth looms so large in his mind. It’s a wet and briny book, full of boats and fish buckets and the smell of salt, so the repeated mention of lions-more typically associated with savanna than with coastline-seems odd and out of place. Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea is haunted by a recurring motif of lions running across an African beach.
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