The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
1963 • 144 pages
Ratings23
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings23
Average rating3.5
*The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea* tells of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.
Reviews with the most likes.
One of the best books I read this year. Its short length if just right for what is trying to convey, and all the characters are written excellently. Descriptions of the decaying, but industrious harbor of Yokohama is also a poignant frame for the novel overall. On purely formalistic terms, I think this novel is excellent.
This book dealt with nihilism, or as some of the characters in this book expresses it “the emptiness of the world”, in an unsettling, but also in an honest and beautiful way that really speaks to me. Some of the characters find sparks in the emptiness that truly moves them, but they all realize in some way that the sparks are either impermanent, false or unrealistic, and for one of them something one has to give up.
How does one deal with the emptiness: Fill it with blood? Glory in death? Adventure? Living truly honestly? Or perhaps compromising somehow is the only realistic option. As someone who was, and still is to some lesser degree, a disillusioned youth, I appreciate this book for its beauty in its portrayal of dangerous, but honest, nihilism, apathy, and disillusionment.
The language was a bit flowery for me and slow in cadence. When everything starts to happen it just finishes.
An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.
