This is my fourth go-round with Hemingway, and it's just not his best effort. That said, it's an experimental, short book, sort of a compilation of short stories about this boat captain smuggling contraband between Key West and Cuba. Or at least it starts out that way. What it ends up being is some sort of viewpoint-shifting slice of life story about life in the Keys during the Great Depression. It's a bit of an interesting mess. Credit to Hemingway for experimenting, you know? Nowadays a perspective-shifting novel is nothing new, but back in the 1930s maybe he was trying something really different. It doesn't quite work, doesn't really make a thematically consistent or tonally satisfying story, but I still enjoyed the highlights and the book wasn't really long enough for the mistakes to drag out much.
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