The Sailor from Gilbralter

by Marguerite Duras

Book Overview

"A haunting tale of strange and random passion."--New York TimesDisaffected, bored with his career at the French Colonial Ministry (where he has copied out birth and death certificates for eight... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394744519
• ISBN13: 9780394744513
• Release Date: February 1986
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Sun drenched malaise

I confess that in spite of having studied French I had never read Marguerite Duras until picking up The Sailor From Gibraltar. It is a stunning gem of a book. I found myself wanting to put it down not because it wasn't good but because it was too effective. The kind of malaise, boredom, and drunken, sun-addled stupor in which the characters are adrift comes off the page and settles on the reader. The plot is deceptively simple; it starts with the narrator, who is on vacation from a Bartleby-like job in the Foreign Service, where he copies birth and death certificates. He is oppressed by the heat, often drunken and annoyed with his mistress who insists on playing the tourist and has expectations of marriage. Feeling trapped, the narrator abandons her and his job in a little Italian coastal village in favor of Anna, a mysterious widow who searches the ocean in her yacht for the sailor from Gibraltar, a fugitive murderer with whom she had an affair as a young woman. The real story takes place in the subtle nuances of the narrator's growing relationship with Anna, the crew of the yacht and the influence of the unseen sailor from Gibraltar. The characters are selfish, indulgent, and often ridiculous and yet it is compelling to watch them in their lazy and never ending quest for the sailor. Even these vapid individuals become existential fodder for Duras. Indeed, seems to come out of the same world from which Albert Camus wrote The Stranger. In this world, the heat of the sun could make you quit your job, abandon your mistress and travel around the world or murder a man. It is no surprise that The Sailor from Gibraltar was adapted for film. Duras conjures intense, haunting imagery. I can almost see the camera angles and the shimmer of sunlight reflecting off sand and water. This is the second imprint from Open Letter Books that I have read and if their choices for works in translation continue to be this good, I will start to seek out more works from their catalog. Kudos to Barbara Bray for a dazzling translation.

Pleasantly Meandering Travel Story

One of my fondest memories from college is sitting in my fav bohemian café near the music school and reading Marguerite Duras's 1952 novel "The Sailor from Gibraltar." It was February in one of those dim, decaying cities on the Erie where most of the industry has moved overseas, leaving only a few colleges and hospitals, as well as the retail sector, to provide employment. Under the gray skies, dirty snow, and dingy pseudo-Modernist buildings, the town had a sadly Communist-era Eastern European feel. I was often reminded of Mati Unt's "Things in the Night," a 1990 Estonian novel set partially amid the endless Soviet-built concrete apartment blocks of Tallinn. Unfortunately, an act of terrorism destroys Tallinn's power supply on New Year's Day, leaving the residential district seemingly deserted beneath suffocating layers of snow. That is kind of how you feel in the upstate New York's "rust belt" during the winter too. But Duras's pleasantly meandering story provided a nice respite. The plot is deceptively simple: a bored, angry, frustrated Frenchman on vacation in Italy with his vapid mistress ends up running off with a wealthy widow who spends her days roaming the world in her yacht, forever looking for her "sailor from Gibraltar." There really isn't any conflict per se. The novel is essentially a travel narrative in which the characters are secondary to beautifully evocative prose that paints vivid portraits of beaches and dances along the Italian coast, the bejeweled waters of the Mediterranean, the crowded streets of China, and the post-colonial exoticism of North Africa. I think "The Sailor from Gibraltar" is best summed up as the antithesis to Paul Bowles's "The Sheltering Sky," the darkly hypnotic tale, first published in 1949, of insipid American tourists lost in the stark and monotonous dunes of the Sahara. Interestingly, both novels draw from Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," but whereas Bowles and Conrad both focus on death and madness, Duras treats the journey into the alien unknown as merely one more episode in a leisurely, never-ending adventure. Although people meet, fall in love, form friendships, and then leave each other, "The Sailor from Gibraltar" never takes itself too seriously. It simply floats along from port to port, skillfully recalling the casual glamour of the mid-century, that era before plastic flip-flops and dopey t-shirts. It is both the ultimate beach read and a real literary treat. So if ever you find yourself trapped in the winters of upstate New York, seeing out your window nothing but a grayscale panorama, this is the perfect book for you. My only complaint is that cover Open Letter Press has designed - it looks way too much like the new edition of "Catch-22" with its bold, heavy colors that do nothing to suggest the beauty of Duras's airy prose. But publishing aesthetics aside, "The Sailor from Gibraltar" comes highly recommended.

Give it all up for a trip to the unknown... they did!

I picked this up on a whim. I've enjoyed Duras in the past and it was a story about travel and love - perfect. Turns out, it was an excellent novel.The beginning felt slow, but that's because Duras has a tendency to describe things so dispassionately that it feels dull. Later in the novel, all those descriptions had laid a necessary foundation for events and conversations that would have seemed completely disjointed without a solid background. The plot sounds like a soap opera: man on vacation decides to leave boring girlfriend and dull job meets a rich widow sailing around the world in search of long lost lover. However, and thank goodness, it's not that simple, and not nearly that sappy. Both man and woman aggressively resist falling in love. Neither of them want to, but they do, but they don't.... Plus, there are a handful of colorful characters they meet and travel with along the way.It's a character-intense novel that uses a simple plot as a basis to develop complicated personalities and relationships. Special bonus, it's out of print - so you can read something unusual and spark conversation yourself!I recommend this for folks who like to analyze and then re-analyze followed by over-analyze life's happenings and participants. Be prepared to not want to put it down towards the end!

Beautiful, haunting

A beautiful, haunting story. Love/obsession that may be only what it's perceived to be, or maybe not. By far the best of Duras' early works. A book I knew I'd have to read again before I even finished the first time.