The Sailor from Gibraltar - (Open Letter Modern Classics) by Marguerite Duras (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"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 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-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.

Review Quotes

"It's not a book to rush through. It's a book to be savored while drinking cognac and smoking pretentious cigarettes ... Whether [it's] a lost love or a reason not to go home again, Duras captures the longing that infects her 'haracters -- and all of us from time to time -- with elegant prose and a story that will set you blissfully adrift."--Jessa Crispin, NPR

"Despite the novel's dizzying pace, Volpi never loses sight of his characters, and it is their richness that makes "Season of Ash" a tour de force. Fans of Roberto Bolano, Thomas Pynchon and even Leo Tolstoy would do well to add this novel to their reading lists."--Rebecca Oppenheimer, The Howard County Times

"Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it's also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write ... Volpi is a genius, that you have to buy this book, and that he'll end up with the Nobel Prize in Literature if there is any justice in the world ... Translating genius requires itself a certain genius. [Alfred] MacAdam is already well-lauded for his work as a translator, but someone needs to give this man a medal for his current effort."--Okla Elliot, Inside Higher Ed

About the Author

Marguerite Duras wrote dozens of plays, film scripts, and novels, including The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Sea Wall, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour. She's most well known for The Lover which received the Goncourt prize in 1984 and was made into a film in 1992.

Barbara Bray translated several works by Marguerite Duras, including The Malady of Death, The Lover, and The War. In addition, she has translated Jean Genet, Ismail Kadare, and Tahar Ben Jelloun, and has received the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.