The Sailor from Gilbralter [Paperback]

Marguerite Duras (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 1986

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 of The 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

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation)

About the Author

Marguerite Duras was born in Giadinh, Vietnam (then Indochina) to French parents. During her lifetime she wrote dozens of plays, film scripts, and novels, including The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Sea Wall, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and was associated with the nouveau roman (or new novel) French literary movement. Duras is probably most well known for The Lover, an autobiographical work that received the Goncourt prize in 1984 and was made into a film in 1992. She died in Paris in 1996 at the age of 81. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 318 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (February 12, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394744519
• ISBN-13: 978-0394744513
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,758,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Give it all up for a trip to the unknown... they did!, August 21, 2000

By 

Christine Taylor - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sailor from Gibraltar (Calderbook, Cb157) (Paperback)

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!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sun drenched malaise, March 5, 2009

By 

Maren Robinson (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sailor from Gibraltar (Open Letter Modern Classics) (Paperback)

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.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, haunting, January 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sailor from Gilbralter (Paperback)

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.