5 stars for The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez.
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor written by Colombian journalist/writer Gabriel García Márquez, is originally published in 1955 as a series of instalments that run for fourteen consecutive days in El Espectador newspaper. It is later published as a book in 1970 with the Spanish title Relato de un náufrago.
This book is a journalistic reconstruction of the events told in first person account from the viewpoint of 20-year old sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, who is lost at sea for 10 days on the Caribbean before being washed on a coast that he later discovers to be Colombia.
Though the story is relatively short and easy to read with 128 pages in print, the same cannot be said of its effect on my mind after reading.
The riveting account of the sailor's odyssey and ironclad will to survive, with nothing but boundless horizon, no one but sharks - that arrive punctually a little after 5pm each evening and vanish by nightfall - as companions, is so artfully narrated that the ten days of drifting in a life raft in the ocean is never for a moment monotonous but filled with the terrifying trepidation of what is to come.
Despite the author's claim that he did not want to publish this book, I am glad that it has been printed and even translated to English in 1986 and now, one of my favourite stories in the non-fiction genre.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication date: 6 Mar 2014
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Translated by Randolph Hogan. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal.
*Blurb from FantasticFiction*
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