Book Club Accompanies a Shipwrecked Sailor for Ten Days

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: who drifted on a life raft for ten days without food or water, was proclaimed a national hero, kissed by beauty queens, made rich through publicity, and then spurned by the government and forgotten for all time, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was the shortest book we have read for discussion in a long time…maybe the shortest ever (chime in with a comment if you want to). The whole title is clearly the longest title in our history! This won’t be the shortest blog post, though. (chime in on that, too, if you want to do some archive-diving).

Dennis presented the book with very interesting background information about both the author and the book. Marquez was born in Colombia. His grandparents lived with him, and he treasured his grandfather’s stories and became a journalist. As a journalist, Marquez lived in New York City, Mexico City, Spain, Paris, and Cuba. As a novelist, Marquez liked to work with true stories and based some or all his novels on them.

The Shipwrecked Sailor story had a strange history, which Dennis explained. When the sailor was first rescued, news media under the Colombia dictator’s regime publicized the story. The reports told of a storm and a shipwreck on the way from Mobile, AL to Colombia and then of the individual sailor’s survival. This was an example of “fake news” to protect the dictatorial and unscrupulous government, which owned the ship as part of the Colombian Navy. The truth was that the ship was overloaded with heavy contraband from the United States. There was no storm. A variety of heavy appliances, washing machines etc, that the sailors had bought to bring home to Colombia and loaded on the deck made the ship top-heavy. In heavy winds and rough waves, the ship tipped, and much of the contraband and 8 unlucky sailors slipped off the deck. All who went overboard drowned except one sailor, who lived to tell his story.

He told his story to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who serialized the truth in a newspaper in 1955 with the sailor named as the author. The Colombian government responded by shutting down that newspaper. Marquez published the story as a book in 1970; it was translated into English in 1986.

Our discussion covered reactions to reading the book; mostly, that the readers felt that they were there in the ship and then the lifeboat, suffering along with the sailor the seasickness, sunburn, shivering, fear as the sharks circled, hope, hopelessness, hunger and thirst for 10 days. Dennis brought up “magical realism,” a storytelling tool that Marquez had mastered. We talked about which parts of the story might have been magical realism, such as the sailor’s rendition of talks he had with another sailor who "appeared" in the raft on and off, and the old seagull’s staying on the lifeboat for days and nights, eventually captured in the sailor’s hands and held tight like a stuffed animal for a night in the lifeboat.

All were impressed with the author’s writing style.

The complexities of the logistics behind the event, the politics, and the truth of the history provided a lot of discussion.  

Courtesy of Dennis, here is a photo of the ship; contraband is visible if you can zoom in far enough. Also, above is a photo of the kind of lifeboat - Put a bird on it...