2January2009
The Sailor From Gibraltar
Posted by Sara under: Reviews; Book Challenges.
by Marguertie Duras
If I was asked to list the most famous French novelists from the 1900’s on, Duras would probably be one of the first handful that I name. I’ve never actually read Duras, however, mostly because her books have never been thrown my way by a recommending friend or bookseller. The Sailor from Gibraltar is one of her earliest works and not one of her most famous, nor supposedly one of her bests. If that’s the case, I must read her better work because I absolutely loved this book.
It is an airy book. There are no “issues”– no politics or battles or tragedy. Instead the focus is on simpler, more ethereal elements like forgetting, love, boredom, internality. The simplicity is evident in any plot summary. A man quits his boring desk job to join a woman who sails around the Mediterranean on her yacht, looking for a lost love. It’s not a travel narrative, though. Most of the novel takes place on the yacht deck or in hotel cafeterias, the narrator trying to avoid the uniqueness of different locales and simply relax with a glass of wine. Nor is it a “sea novel.” There is no focus on rigging, etc. The sailors don’t do very much sailing; they lounge, drink, talk and make love (subtly. Everything takes place behind the scenes and between lines of dialogue. You have to pay careful attention to see who leaves whose bedroom in the morning to imagine that anything has ever happened.) No, there’s no ropes, cables, hulls, keels, etc, at least except in passing. Instead the sea contributes its calmness. Its idleness. The sea never DOES anything, yet it’s always there, its sheer constancy is what influences us, its tides, currents, weather.
The narrator learns to mimic the sea in this way. At first he is typically unsympathetic; he is sometimes cruel, drunk, listless. His strength that ultimately saves him is his ability, like the sea, to simply be. He waits, sits, forgives, has patience to challenge a saint’s. He taught me how to do the same. I read it over the holiday break, during which time I had very little to do and worried about all of the time that I was ‘wasting.’ In the novel the narrator tells his impatient girlfriend, “You have to waste a bit of time, otherwise you waste it all.” I needed to hear that as well as she did.
A summer book released in the midst of winter. While we are confined by snow drifts, the narrator is confined by unbearable heat. While we here in the Pacific Northwest are trapped in our homes, waiting for the roads to clear so that we can return to work, the crew are confined to their yacht, addicted to the endless search for the sailor from Gibraltar. Strangely appropriate for the season, and exactly what I needed to read this week.