The first thing I must iterate is this book is not a good representation of Marguerite Duras' talent. I have read eight of her many books, and this is the first that I have disliked.
What begins as a tale of obsession slowly unravels to become merely a rambling account of the aimless wanderings of a very confusing cast of characters that the reader soon realizes he or she doesn't really care about.
A man on holiday in Italy with his girlfriend suddenly decides to quit his dead-end job, leave the girlfriend, and stay on in Italy, where he hopes to meet the mysterious American woman who has spent the last three years searching for a sailor with whom she had an affair. And, just like the all-too-predictable plots of Hollywood movies, he meets the woman, she invites him to join her on her boat, and away they sail in search of the elusive sailor who, it turns out, is actually wanted for the murder of an American ball-bearings tycoon.
If it weren't for the lucious prose of Duras, I would have never made it to the end of this novel, which dallies at a tortuous pace between plot and a meager attempt at character study. Towards the end of the book, Duras dedicates no less than 15 tiresome pages to a ciruitous drunken argument in a bar about the probability of animals existing during the ice age.
Typically, I love reading stories by Duras. Two of her brilliant novels have been turned into screenplays for movies: Hiroshima, Mon Amour and The Lover. She has a wonderfully lyrical style of writing that is almost totally missing from The Sailor from Gibraltar. Perhaps it is because in this book she relies heavily on narrative, which sounds stilted against the philosophical thoughtfulness of her more descriptive prose passages.
For these reasons, I urge you to read several other novels by Duras before this one, lest you be discouraged from reading anything else by this very important 20th Century author.
