Book Review of "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

AUTHOR: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

ISBN: 978-0-6797-2205-2

PUBLISHER: Vintage

RATING: 2 out of 5 stars

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BOOK BLURB:

On February 26, 1955, Luis Alejandro Velasco was washed off the deck of the Colombian destroyer Caldas along with seven of his crew mates. His companions drowned, but Velasco was left to drift "in the midst of the sea's dark murmur" for ten days and nights before he could reach shore. Afterward, he was surprised to find himself a hero.

BOOK REVIEW:

I'm not even sure why I bought this book ... all I can figure is I was surfing through Amazon.com one day, probably for a book on poetry about the sea, and this came up as one of those "you might also like this" links. To be honest, I've never read anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez before (unless maybe a short story or two in English class, but if so I can't really recall which), and as I'm interested in the sea and shipwrecks and whatnot, I thought what the hell and stuck this on my wish list. Then, some time later, I picked this off my list when I needed to buy something cheap to throw me into the free shipping ballpark. This was a while back, but I just got around to reading it -- picked it off my shelf earlier this week when I wanted something quick and short to read.

I hadn't really looked at this book before this week. I thought it was fiction; it's not. The cover says, "Winner of the Nobel Prize," but that doesn't refer to the book itself -- Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his novels and stories, not for this particular book (which wasn't even published until 1986). And the title itself is misleading ... the sailor in question was not shipwrecked, he was thrown overboard during the course of a voyage on choppy seas and the ship he was on didn't bother to turn around and rescue him.

I'll admit that I didn't quite comprehend the politics involved in why the ship didn't return -- something to do with illegal cargo on board that the captain didn't want the government to find out about, so when the sailor washed ashore ten days later, he was told to say that the ship was in rough weather and that's why he was thrown overboard. But this is the Caribbean in February, a time when there aren't many storms at sea, and eventually the regime collapsed and the sailor came to Marquez with the truth of his story.

Anyway ... about that story. The prose in this book is very distant from the events that take place. Here you have a sailor thrown overboard and clinging to a raft for ten days. It's a sort of "Old Man and the Sea" type tale, but because the sailor admits that he didn't think much during those ten days, there really isn't much to make you empathize with him. I don't know if that's a result of the translation (the story was originally written in Spanish) or if there just isn't enough emotion infused in the tale to keep you involved.

I would've liked this story better if the sailor did something more than lie on a raft and stare at the sun for the ten days he was at sea. Some in-depth thought processes would have been nice, something to show us what it was like to be there, instead of just telling us it was bad. Based on this story alone, I probably won't pick up another book by Marquez.