Customer Reviews

Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine

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This neglected masterpiece needs to be returned to print immediately. It is one of the greatest novels of the past half century. Prose this exquisite and sad and funny deserves a wide, ecstatic readership. This is a sea-tale about the deep loneliness between intimates and how that very loneliness can result in an even more powerful bond.

if you like to read books that are interesting and strange and funny and sad you will like to read this book. this book is much better than this review. the book is well written, this review is not. everything this review lacks, the novel contains. if you like boats you must read this book. this review is failing to do this book justice. it is very good, you will be happy, it will make you smile.

I wrote a review of this during lunch and lost it completely. So here goes it. Again. David insisted that I read this book before sending it to him. So last night, I babysat an insomnia and read the book like a slow lightning bolt. This book deserves my nod.

To barge on a barge, the story begins with the sardonic, melodious voice of Mrs Unguentine, whose abusive, inebriated husband invents lavished nautical things such as a colossal dome on a barge and a fake, really fake, Amazon to pass their 40 years voyage at sea staying quite clear of land and civilization. Poor (sweet) potentially obese Ungentine endures forty years of the tendered, reticent, violent blows of her brilliant, mildly deranged marriage.

An eccentric meditation on the perverse connubial life of a modern Adam and Eve. The narrative flows intensely and fluidly. An extraordinary invention. Too bad the book got submerged or blanched out by the political upheavals (Vietnam war, the Munich Massacre) of the 70s and I haven't been exposed to it until now.

'Log of the S.S. The Mrs Urguentine'... Do you need any more cues? It's frankly clear from the start that we are dealing with 'cult' stuff.

Written in 1972, this short piece of fiction (little over 100 pages, plus a 5-pages afterword to help you put things in perspective) can be enjoyed in one gulp.

It chronicles the adventures of Mr. Unguentine, his wife (who is to remain namelesse throughout the novel) and their uncanny marriage, living aboard a quasi-magical barge complete with a glass-dome, a forest, animals and a maze-like feel.
This smells in many ways of magical realism and, while it feels much more post-modern than anything Marquez wrote, it still brings him to mind from time to time.
Mr. Unguentine is a surreal character. He took to living on a barge, far from any form of civilization and took his wife with him (almost adbucted her, I'd say). Their relationship borders on the master-slave paradigm, although Mr. Uguentine is capable, from time to time, to show love in his own peculiar ways.

In a way, this novel belongs to the 'what if?' literary genre. What if two adult people were to live for 40 years in absolute isolation, on a floating barge full of clever (impossible?) inventions? What sort of disturbed/alienated relationship would they develop? Throw in some magical realism and you get the basic, yet deeply original, recipe for this novel.

For those who have adventurous tastes in all-things lit., this might prove to be a deeply satisfying, albeit quick, read.

Wonderful masterpiece in just over 100 pages. To think that this book was out of print makes me nauseous, what other wonderful great novels are we missing out on. This novel is a great achievement, a perfect allegory, along the lines of the magic realism, of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, of every marriage on earth, where "being on the same boat" suddenly acquires a new, frightening, wonderful, inexplicably uncommunicable beauty and pain.

"Forty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas..."

Stanley Crawford's novel, The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, is superb, magic, primeval, and bizarre.

Crawford is a masterful writer. He managed to create a hypnotic, dream-like adventure with virtually no identifiable plot.

This book is a blurry painting.

It is the (not impossible)dream-life of a (more)magical-(less)realist and everybody who has ever wanted to be in love should read it.

Mrs. Unguentine narrates the decades-long history of her willing entrapment by her emotionally unavailable and needy despot of a husband. He takes her out to sea on a big trash barge and founds a dictatorship there with Mrs. Unguentine -- stripped of all other names but his -- as his only subject. He keeps her away from land and news of the outside world, and jealously guards against her attempts to communicate with her old friends. Yet he himself largely ignores her, disappearing into the bowels of the ship for days on end and relaying instructions with curt notes that he leaves inside her sandwiches or on paths he expects her to follow in her chores, as if to underscore his need to own her every moment. He constructs a dome over the forest he has planted on the barge, the better to control and seal off his kingdom. He keeps his navigational charts out of her sight.

Mrs. Unguentine as a narrator is eloquent but a bit of a bore, overly fascinated with her husband's many fantastical habits and contraptions and getting carried away about her sensory experiences. She's at her best when writing about the rare moments of companionship and passion that maintain her husband's hold on her, and when reporting on her timid but witty attempts to draw him out (largely through notes presented at breakfast). Mostly though she talks listlessly about her lonely work on the boat, her occasional tantrums, her efforts to cope with isolation and to finally escape Unguentine's clutches, years after his final disappearance. But it gets boring hanging out with a narrator who has lost almost all sense of her own identity, and the incessant piling on of eccentric details gets old too. And everything is so overloaded with metaphorical connotations.