Ultramarine by Marietta Navarro

 

French fiction

Original title – Ultramarins

Translator – Cory Stockwell

Source – review copy from translator

Now, I was sent a couple of proofs from Heloise, which was kind. I had been sent their first book, and I just never got around to reviewing it. So, I owe them a review or two. They are another publisher that champions female voices as they say on the website. Héloïse Press champions worldwide female talent. Héloïse’s careful selection of books gives voice to emerging and well-established female writers from home and abroad, with a focus on intimate, visceral and powerful narratives. This is the debut novel from French poet and playwright Mariette Navarro. She came up with the idea of the book after she went on a writer’s retreat that was two weeks on a cargo ship from France to the West Indies. Although she had seasickness, the book was inspired by the notes she took while on the ship.

THEY SLIP INTO THE WATER.

The tips of their toes and then their entire bodies: the sharp pain of the cold and the burning salt that seems to become more potent as it touches the skin. Ribcages compressed by the immense ocean, as though the enormous mass, grey in places, didn’t allow itself to be penetrated quite so easily – witness how, from the beginning of the voyage, the water has systematically closed back in upon itself behind the freighter that does everything in its power to cleave it. You can’t tear it like a piece of cloth; you don’t leave any imprint on it, as you would in sand or snow. By plunging into it, you condemn yourself to invisibility

There is something sexual as she watches them in the water

 

Ultramarine is a poetic book that follows a cargo ship on the journey she took from France across the Atlantic. The big difference she wants to make in her story is that the captain of the ship in the book is female. She is the only female on the ship, but she is respected and well-known, as her father was also a well-known captain on the same shipping line. But when she decides that as the sailors would all like a swim in the ocean a sort of  take on the Neptune festival when you cross the from the hemispheres so they are all lower in a lifeboat the twenty of them but did more come back, there is a point while they are swimming where they try to count the sailor and get 21? But after this piece of freedom, the boat has a weird feeling. The boat slows, and things are going strange. Her connection with the crew changed after that event.

She kept going along these lines, feeling her way for-ward, and for a few weeks that was enough to recreate a kind of link – tenuous, shifting – between her and this captain without a ship. Among her clearest visions was the face of death, which her father had clearly witnessed in a way no one living should see, and which explained his silences better than all the medical scans he was made to undergo.

She thought of that passage from the Odyssey that had made such a mark on her when she was small. Ulysses, lost at sea, arrives by chance in the kingdom of the dead, and proceeds to visit them. He meets sailors who have recently died, shipmates whose death he’d been unaware of, and finally, after a dramatic and tearful build-up, his mother. He’s the only person in the world to have ever been offered the chance to speak to his mother one last time. As for her father, perhaps he also found Ulysses’ secret pathway, but didn’t come all the way back, instead remaining there in this world between worlds where it matters little whether you walk in the rain

this is near the end but Mariette said she loved the Odysessy so this passage jumped out at me

This book has a poetic feel. The Beyond the Zero Podcast features an interview with both the writer and translator, which made me want to read the book. It explained that the seed of novella was from the two weeks she spent on the cargo ship. But the main part of the text is from her notes on the two weeks she spent on the boat. But she wondered what would happen if. The captain, instead of a man, was a woman, and if they had this event in the middle of the cruise, what would happen? The later part of the book has an eerie feel. At times, something isn’t quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it. She mentioned she is a fan of sea-based books from Odyssey to Moby Dick, even though the title is a nod to the deepest blue, a nod to the ocean, a title that was also used by Malcolm Lowry for a ship-based book. Also, there was a band called Ultramarine, best known for the United Kingdom album, which would fit well with this book. it is poetic and dreamy at times. The writer is working on a new novel that will be out later this year in France, and hopefully, we get another poetic slice from this writer. This is one of those books that hasn’t a lot but has such beauty in the writing and the translation. They talked about how some of the ship terms were hard to translate and how poetic Mariiette’s writing is? Have you read any of the books from Heloise Press yet?

Winstons score +A stunning poetic book about a captain and her crew after a swim