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Loading... Le marin de Gibraltar (Folio t. 943) (French Edition) (original 1952; edition 2013)by Marguerite Duras (Author)
Work InformationThe Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras (1952)
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I managed to totally skip a review of this when I finished it, which may explain how I felt about it. I was lost alot of the time, following the basic plot elements but missing all the undertones. It rambled and roamed and the journey wasn't awful but often confusing and I started to feel as drunk as the characters. Bored with his job, tired of his fiance, a civil servant walks away from it all. He joins a mysterious, ridiculously wealthy woman sailing the Mediterranean and the African coast in search of her lover (the sailor in the title). During the course of the voyage, she tells him the story of her life. Former crew members contact her with reports of "sightings" of the sailor. These take them on onshore adventures. But mostly they talk - and drink. She has nothing in life to do except look for the sailor and tell her story. He has nothing to do but go along on the search and listen. The theme is loneliness, boredom, ennui. "Darkness covered the deck and the sea. It spread over me too, and ate at my heart." Are they looking for the sailor? Or for happiness? Or for the elusive "meaning of life"? It's quite a trip and I'm glad I went along. This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers. This book is a translation.The book was a little difficult for me to get into but I have a baby with a lot of distractions. This book takes time to think about and get involved with. 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. 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! no reviews | add a review
"A haunting tale of strange and random passion."--New York Times Disaffected, bored with his career at the French Colonial Ministry (where he has copied out birth and death certificates for eight years), and disgusted by a mistress whose vapid optimism arouses his most violent misogyny, the narrator ofThe Sailor from Gibraltar finds himself at the point of complete breakdown while vacationing in Florence. After leaving his mistress and the Ministry behind forever, he joins the crew of The Gibraltar, a yacht captained by Anna, a beautiful American in perpetual search of her sometime lover, a young man known only as the "Sailor from Gibraltar." First published in 1952, this early novel of Duras's--which was made into a film in 1967--shows those preoccupations which have so deeply concerned her in her later novels and film scripts: loneliness, boredom, the inevitability and intangibility of love. The lambent poetry of the book, and the limning of a woman's mind, her love and sense of the inevitability of that love are singularly Marguerite Duras. Marguerite Duras wrote dozens of plays, film scripts, and novels, includingThe Ravishing of Lol Stein,The Sea Wall, andHiroshima, Mon Amour. She's most well known forThe Lover which received the Goncourt prize in 1984 and was made into a film in 1992. Barbara Bray translated several works by Marguerite Duras, includingThe Malady of Death,The Lover, andThe War. In addition, she has translated Jean Genet, Ismail Kadare, and Tahar Ben Jelloun, and has received the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumMarguerite Duras's book The Sailor from Gibraltar was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
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