Sandwich Joe
Ultramarine is a novella that I initially approached with the wrong expectations, and I think that’s worth naming upfront because it shaped my early reading experience. The premise sounds like the engine of a thriller or slow-burn horror. It isn’t. Once I stopped waiting for that shift, I found something quieter and more rewarding underneath.
Navarro comes from theatre and poetry, and it shows in the best possible way. This is a book of atmosphere and interiority rather than plot. The sailors function almost as a collective entity (similar to the girls in Brutes by Dizz Tate), a force rather than individuals. The Captain, unnamed and deliberately opaque, is less a character to know than a position to inhabit, a woman who built her authority entirely on control and protocol, and suddenly confronted with something she cannot name.
The water is doing heavy Jungian lifting throughout. The ocean here is the unconscious, and the 21st man reads as shadow material that surfaces whether invited or not. Crucially, the Captain never enters the water to swim herself. She facilitates everyone else’s descent and stays dry on the deck. And then the unconscious comes to her anyway.
Eve Hill-Agnus’s translation deserves particular mention. The prose has a rhythmic quality that mimics the rocking of a ship, and for a book this dependent on that effect, a translator who couldn’t feel and carry that musicality would have ruined the tone of the novella.
My one genuine complaint is that I wanted more of it. When the writing is this good, brevity feels like deprivation.
Ultramarine is a novella that I initially approached with the wrong expectations, and I think that’s worth naming upfront because it shaped my early reading experience. The premise sounds like the engine of a thriller or slow-burn horror. It isn’t. Once I stopped waiting for that shift, I found something quieter and more rewarding underneath.
Navarro comes from theatre and poetry, and it shows in the best possible way. This is a book of atmosphere and interiority rather than plot. The sailors function almost as a collective entity (similar to the girls in Brutes by Dizz Tate), a force rather than individuals. The Captain, unnamed and deliberately opaque, is less a character to know than a position to inhabit, a woman who built her authority entirely on control and protocol, and suddenly confronted with something she cannot name.
The water is doing heavy Jungian lifting throughout. The ocean here is the unconscious, and the 21st man reads as shadow material that surfaces whether invited or not. Crucially, the Captain never enters the water to swim herself. She facilitates everyone else’s descent and stays dry on the deck. And then the unconscious comes to her anyway.
Eve Hill-Agnus’s translation deserves particular mention. The prose has a rhythmic quality that mimics the rocking of a ship, and for a book this dependent on that effect, a translator who couldn’t feel and carry that musicality would have ruined the tone of the novella.
My one genuine complaint is that I wanted more of it. When the writing is this good, brevity feels like deprivation.