When the machines are stilled and the afternoon air tastes of salt, you can slice through the silence and swim deep, into the deeper silence of the sea, provided you have the necessary books!
You will need two books that feel as soft as well worn coins, with the story bobbing up in between. You will need to squat on your haunches and forget where you were; soon your mind will paddle forth into an experience that is like sea water in your mouth; your hair redolent of ocean…
I thought I had begun to tire of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, old master writer that he is. I had read too much of him and could not shake the feeling off between one book and the next.
He writes too much and always of love I felt. There was only so much I could consume of the rich platters of sensuous prose, mostly revolving around sensual lives. Nobel Laureate that Marquez is, he has mostly if not only, written about love, the physical aspects of love. But this was before I drifted into a Landmark Bookstore, because that is the only place in a Mall I can tolerate being for longer than an hour. This was before I nibbled on the back covers and random pages of books that I would not buy at that store and chanced upon a slim volume, “GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ – The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.
One hundred and six pages long. As much a novella as another Nobel laureate – Earnest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Both books had a sailing man pitted against the sea, a tough protagonist. Both had fish in it, big fish. Both had despair and hope; both had the men fighting with the last of their strength. Both ended on the shore. Both were written in tight journalistic prose. And both were such differently eclectic reading experiences!
In The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Marquez moves away from his usual lush and luscious prose; he adopts a more a clipped journalistic style, as if he wanted to cut away everything but the sailor’s most stark experience of the sea. The story line is straight forward, like the writing. In this story Marquez takes the true life experience of a shipwrecked sailor and makes it his own.
A sailor, Velasco, falls into the ocean during a bad storm. He does not realise that he has fallen until he tries to surface and finds nothing but ocean all around him and then in the distance he sees the destroyer plunge into an abyss. The cargo from the destroyer float up and Velasco tries to keep himself afloat by grabbing one after the other. Bobbing in the ocean he sees the two rafts that have also fallen over board or been thrown overboard. He sees three of his colleagues struggling in the ocean; none of them can board either of the rafts. Velasco finally hauls himself into one of the rafts and thus manages to save himself. The ship is no longer visible. The waves are choppy and despite his best efforts he cannot save his friends. Velasco finds himself completely alone in the raft; alone with his possessions – his watch which keeps perfect time, a gold ring on his finger, a chain with a medallion of the Virgin of Carmen, his keys to his locker in the destroyer, three business cards that a shop had given him in Mobile (the place from where he got his destroyer assignment) and the clothes on his back and shoes. Thus begins Velasco’s ten day adventure in the Caribbean Sea, during which time he almost starves to death, tries to catch fish, is encircled by sharks, tries to catch and eat an albatross and does all he can not to let his body die. His ordeal ends when he is finally washed ashore in a coastal village in Colombia, rescued and becomes a celebrity. The story moves like an epic, the lone warrior’s battle with the ocean shimmering against a great wall of sea water. Marquez is at his poetic best in this sparsely worded yet loaded with imagery novella.
The same is exactly true about Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Except that we expect Hemingway to write sparse journalistic prose. Except that in this less than hundred pages long, almost like a long story, novella Hemingway scaled poetic heights never reached before by him. Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, The Old Man and the Sea tells the epic ordeal of Santiago and his battle with an unusually large Marlin, the little boy who does not lose faith in him, the unrelenting sea, sharks and of course the Marlin that puts up a fight like a true warrior. From the very first line of this story – ” He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” – right up to the concluding sentences - ” Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.” – Hemingway’s prose keeps his readers’ hearts taut, and when you finally emerge from it, it takes you a few minutes to get a bearing of your physical surroundings.
When I first read The Old Man and the Sea, I was convinced that should I ever live a castaway’s life (and in those days I mostly dreamed of living like Robinson Crusoe) I would cast myself away with a few chosen books and Hemingway’s book would be the first in my satchel bound library, to be read and read for the rest of my castaway life! Now of course I know that Marquez’s book Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is an equal contender!
Previously published at Rumjhum Biswas’ blog, Writers & Writerisms
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Rumjhum Biswas lives at the edge of the sun toasted city of Chennai, in a corner where migratory birds cruise the sky above the din of a burgeoning IT hub and an ancient temple dips its toes into a not so ancient mini lake. Her writing life will hibernate while she gets used to this new life.
As a Suffolk County Police Officer for more than two decades, I am used to writing “just the facts.” When I retired to spend more time with my family after having survived breast cancer, I wanted to pursue my dream of writing full-time. In addition to writing a true crime memoir, I have tried my hand at hint fiction, flash fiction, essays, short stories, and blog writing. I joined the NY/TriState chapter of 
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