The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras

Paperback

“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.

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.