We Belgians celebrate the anniversary of the inauguration of King Leopold I in 1831 today, and I have been doing so by sitting in the garden, ignoring the current internet slapfight, and reading the gripping account of one man’s battle with a huge fish. (And other things too, but that was the book I finished.)

It is very good. Hemingway must be rather easy to pastiche – those sentences that have two or more clauses linked by “and”, moving from statis to dynamic: “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.” But somehow he gets it just right; as I sat in the garden reading, I was very much out on a small boat in the Gulf of Mexico, wrestling with the marlin, exhaustedly accepting the victory of the sharks. This is, believe it or not, the first Hemingway I have ever read, but it won’t be the last.