THE SAILOR FROM GIBRALTAR by Marguerite Duras. 318 pages. Grove. $5.95.
Since the decline of literary existentialism, French fiction has been dominated by four authors—Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Butor and Duras—who write the anti-roman, the non-novel in which characters are impersonal, time floats out the window, and action is as fragmented as a cracked kaleidoscope. The casual reader may well have trouble telling one anti-novelist from another, but in the case of Marguerite Duras, the problem is simple: she is the only natural writer. The others construct fiction to demonstrate a pet theory. She writes about people and their moods with incomparable ease and sensuality.
These qualities are nowhere more apparent than in The Sailor from Gibraltar, an expansive, leisurely novel written in 1952 but only recently translated. A year ago, British Director Tony Richardson turned the book into a water logged movie starring Jeanne Moreau at her most brackish (TIME, May 5). That was too bad, and unnecessary, for the book at its best has the sunny charm of one of Renoir's floating picnics.
A young Parisian, bored with his job and his mistress, ships aboard a yacht owned by a rich and beautiful woman who has but one aim in life: to find a sailor from Gibraltar, who she feels was the love of her life. As she remembers him, he was no ordinary navvy: at 20, when they had their stormy affair, he was fleeing French law for "the murder of the American ballbearings king, Nelson Nelson." Though she has had no word of him in years, her yacht, with its crew of seven, seeks him in ports on the seven seas without a scintilla of rational evidence to go by.
The only impetus that this female
Flying Dutchman responds to is word from cronies or ex-crew members, and she does not lack for that. Messages come with poignant regularity from shore-bound mariners needing loans or new pickup trucks, who cable a likely description of the sailor. She is compelled to answer as if to the call of sirens, but scarcely cares when instead of her beloved she finds a swindler in Dahomey or a filling-station attendant in Sete. The same indifference is adopted by her new lover, the young Parisian, who comes to realize that their only true bond is their endless quixotic search. The reader sticks with them both, if only to drink the whiskies, hear the conversation, and see the sky and the coast as they shimmer from the yacht.
Since the publication of The Sailor from Gibraltar, Author Duras has succeeded Simone de Beauvoir as Paris' first lady of letters, though her novels have become more schematic and cinematic. As Sailor from Gibraltar shows, her real forte is a less complex, but rarer, understanding of people and a talent for simple storytelling.