Word: sailors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...AFFAIR: THE CASE OF ALFRED DREYFUS, Jean-Denis Bredin LESS THAN ONE, Joseph Brodsky RAIN OR SHINE, Cyra McFadden THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR, Gabriel Garcia Marquez THE TENDER PASSION, Peter Gay WISEGUY, Nicholas Pileggi
...didn't know the Highland fling from a sailor's hornpipe," he said later. "I watched the fellow's feet next to me and did what he did." He quickly graduated to Broadway musicals, then in 1930 was brought to Hollywood as a contract player for Warner Bros., the studio that had ushered in the talkies a few years earlier with The Jazz Singer. Many silent-film stars' careers were destroyed by the triumph of sound; Cagney's was ensured by it. He was one of the first actors to grab an audience by sending dialogue special delivery, with...
Three stories dovetail in this small book. One of them involves the ordeal of Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor on a Colombian destroyer. He was swept overboard and into the Caribbean, along with seven other crew members, on Feb. 28, 1955, and endured ten days in a life raft before swimming ashore to what would become a hero's welcome. Once the cheering had died down, Velasco offered to sell his account to El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota. A young reporter named Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent some 120 hours interviewing the survivor and shaping his recollections into a first...
These intertwined circumstances make The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor something more than another raid on a successful author's juvenilia. For Garcia Marquez, who would become world famous through his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, this early effort in journalism provided a lesson in the bizarre effects that telling a tale can have on characters and author alike. His attempt to reconstruct Velasco's experiences as factually as possible assumed a life of its own; the sailor who braved exposure and sharks fell afoul of the words of his story. And words, paradoxically, rescued Velasco's adventure from...
...difficult to distinguish the contributions of Velasco, who was 20 at the time of his adventure and called Fatso by his crew mates, from those of Garcia Marquez. When the simple sailor remarks upon his "indefatigable desire to live," the presence of the aspiring author who had read his Faulkner and Hemingway seems self-evident. But these literary touches only add zest to an already astounding saga. Those who care about the career of Garcia Marquez will find much of interest here. And so will readers who want to know how it feels to be at the mercy of nature...