This is Marquez’s account of a real-life event. In 1955, eight crew members of the destroyer Caldas, were swept into the Caribbean Sea. The sole survivor, Luis Alejandro Belasco, told the true version of the events to Marquez, causing great scandal at the time.
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this so much. If you’re looking for an interesting, transportive read, this one is for you.
The Story
As an account of a real live event, it was really quite capturing in both simplistic and complex ways in that it embraced the mundane and humanistic qualities of somebody lost at sea. From hope to hope realized, survivor and loss, logical and madman at sea, it explored every aspect of it.
The foreword was very interesting to read about from both raw and tailored insight to how the Colombian navy destroyer and backstory of the tragedy came about.
The Writing
Really captured the essence and timeline of the story. Bridge from logical to illogical, descriptive to to less descriptive, made for good flow in a story that had both gave perspective into the sailor’s mind, his thinking, rationale, while also his irrational behavior for making sense of less sense at the time.
I’d be curious to read it in original Spanish.
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