Bjorn Larsson

According to Buddhism, suffering arises from opposing the flow of life and clinging to forms that are deceptively permanent, whether they be things, events, people, or ideas. And yet man is like the flight of a bird or the passage of a fish through water, leaving no trace behind; he is like sailing a boat, guided by the winds. And who better than a sailor personifies this condition of transience? We are in a pub in an Irish town, where four people meet; strangers to one another, yet all living in a port town and all having crossed paths with the captain of a cargo ship: Marcel. Rosa Moreno has the smile of Ingrid Bergman, and risks spending her entire life in the same bar in a small port on the Atlantic coast of Spain: and then > everything seemed black to her, as if life were not worth living . A night spent with Marcel gave her dreams of freedom, the possibility of a new life, but also a tangible legacy: a child. Madame Le Grand is a still-attractive widow who spends her life cataloging the stories of all the sailors passing through her port city, > to ensure that all the people she met left a trace behind, instead of vanishing into nothingness, as if they had never existed . She invites Marcel and his crew to dinner and is fascinated by a man who > did not care to know what comes next, (...) greatest desire: none, because it makes one unhappy . Peter Sympson is a jeweler to whom Marcel entrusts a highly valuable gemstone for sale, while revealing to him the profound meaning of his life: > your hobby is precious stones. Mine is fleeting acquaintances and their dreams of life. Jacob Nielsen is a computer scientist who lives in the world of the internet; at times restlessness takes hold of him, and then it takes only > a gust of wind from the sea to sweep away his longing for elsewhere . He meets Marcel and is captivated by the idea of a network of "intertwined ports," of which the captain he met by chance could be the unwitting fulcrum. > And what if in that way they managed to prove that the world is not an impenetrable chaos, a whirlpool of anonymous human beings drowning and lost in their very profusion and diversity? . Rosa Moreno, Madame Le Grand, Peter Sympson, and Jacob Nielsen are there, by chance in the very same pub, to see the man who pulled them out of their monotonous daily existence and propelled them into a hope-filled uncertainty. All four are deluding themselves. For Marcel > binding himself to other human beings would have been like running a mortal danger. Because who better than he could know that all bonds of that kind can be broken? To be alone and free to dance had become his destiny on this side of the grave . Marcel flees on his sailboat, even after learning that Rosa carries his child in her womb. > Strange is the heart of the sailor: he hopes, he fears, he ventures closer and veers off the coast, at last refits the torn sail, and turns his shattered bow toward the ocean, crestfallen, reversing course ( Robert Louis Stevenson, *Underwoods* from *Poesie*, Oscar Classici Mondadori 1997). Stevenson's beautiful quotation is inappropriate. The great English writer is referring to the sailor's life, his irrepressible longing for solitude. Larsson is not speaking of this: the distant, romantically depicted sea remains on the margins; nor is he truly writing about the characters. Even when we learn of Marcel's childhood, in which the captain suffered the loss of all his kin, we realize that it is not this terrible wound of the past that perpetually drives him to flee. The other characters have suffered too; nonetheless, they desperately seek something solid, certainties and relationships to which they can anchor themselves and for which they can live. The novel is a philosophical narrative. The real theme is the contradiction between permanence and transience: impermanence is not an unstable condition to be escaped; it is the very mode of reality, the sign that leaves no record, "emptiness" as an essential given of human being. What nostalgia for the writing of *The True Story of the Pirate Long John Silver*. Just as the narrative style in that splendid novel is vivid and evocative, here the delivery is flat, prosaic, cold. The events unfold without momentum, developed in a bureaucratic and repetitive manner. Why not read it? Trite, flat, and prosaic.