Word: sailor
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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...
...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...
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...
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...
...always irritating the Sawneys. The bobbies are always poking around, and the building inspector keeps checking up on the march of decay that is sweeping over the Sawney's house. The Sawneys grunt, roll over, and start to rebel. In a superb gesture of contempt, old Sailor Sawney, the clan's patriarch, pisses in the Jackson's geranium pot. Before they know it, the police, the neighbors, the Welfare State have crushed the dirty, free, vicious vagrants...