The Story Of
A Shipwreck Sailor
By “Gabriel Marquez”
February
28, 1995, brought news that eight crew members of the destroyer (a ship)
Caldas, of the Colombian Navy, had fallen overboard and disappeared during a
storm in the Caribbean Sea. After four days, the search was abandoned and the
lost sailors were officially declared dead. A week later, however, one of them
turned up half dead on a deserted beach in Northern Colombia, having survived
ten days without food or water on a drifting life raft. This book is a
journalistic story of the survivor, Luis Alejandaro Velasco.
I
had been meaning to read Marquez for quite a while. I have his two most
renowned books, Hundred Years of Solitude
and Love in the time of Cholera. But
I also have a habit of collecting books, and then not reading them for a long
time; however, when I found this book, in the spontaneity of the moment, I
issued it from the library and started reading it right away. Being a survival
book, I was fascinated by it because I hadn’t read any book in this genre
before, and it was also a small book. Since I was not reading any other book at
that time, it perfectly fitted into the queue. Now that I am done reading this
amazing story, it can claim that it was a really good read.
First
of all, it is not fiction. It is a retelling of a true event that occurred in
1995. Although reading it might, at times, seem like a fictional story, the
fact that it really did happen, makes it very interesting and awe-aspiring.
Secondly, the telling of this story with such detail of both the physical and
emotional journey of Velasco in the ten days he miraculously lived in a raft,
without food or water, is really mesmerizing. In its gripping storytelling, you
will imaginatively find yourself there with Velasco, and at times, may even get
close to feeling the sufferings he had gone through in that short, yet
punishing course.
But
here is what makes this book so notable and worthy of praise: while the story
in itself is a really powerful journey of a man who suffered through
everything, yet managed to cling onto life, even though life was very much
ready to leave him, on the other hand, it also presents a viewpoint of what
happens when a survivor does not die
– in other words, how do people treat a man who have just fought death, and
haven’t died. Towards the last two chapters in this book, Marquez and Velasco
shift your attention to the aftermath of a survival, where an ordinary man, who
somehow managed to live, is a made a hero by some, and being taken a fake, by
others, and everything in between.
If
it wasn’t for Marquez, Velasco’s story might not have reached the readers, or
people in general, in its truest essence. People have a habit of personalizing
everything to their interest and viewpoint, which makes the survival of any
extraordinary event’s essence very difficult. We start hearing politicized,
advertised, and personalized versions of the same story being told for
different purposes, to the point where the event itself with all its might,
gets lost into the thin air. Velasco’s story is one of them. He was not a hero,
he was made one, and people thought he was faking his story for it. People, not
Velasco, told his story to make him a hero for their ads, and then snatched it
back when the excitement about it had died. Velasco’s unwillingly heroic story
lived long enough to see its own death.
An excerpt:
I am Luis Alejandro Velasco again,
and that's enough for me. It's the other people who have changed.
For
me, Velasco was a hero – but so are other people who manage to live in a world
that is just as unforgivable and cruel as a sea could be when you are not on a
ship. But this book also shows that how grotesquely one’s earned tale of
heroism could be turned into a publicity stunt – how, even, our survival from
death, a journey so intimate and heavy, could be sold merely for money. Humans,
indeed, are tricky animals.
My praise for the book:
It
is a story of how one becomes a hero, and then, how their heroism dies.
An
intimate, fascinating and gripping survival story.
Ratings:
5/5 *****
A review by: Ejaz
Hussain
November 20, 2019.