"The Lost Sailors"
(Reviewed by Guy Savage JAN 31, 2008)
“The rules were the same on land and sea. For all men, whoever they were. Everything depended on the way you dealt with other people. The rules--laws, codes, conventions--only found their true meaning after that. But he never looked beyond the basic meaning of the rules: a way of managing men. When it came to rules, he never really thought of men as real people. Man didn’t enter into the law. He had to submit to it. And in the social hierarchy, it was better to command than to submit.”
Jean-Claude Izzo, author of the Marseilles Trilogy (Total Chaos, Chourmo, and Solea) creates another slice of Marseilles life in his latest novel, The Lost Sailors. While the focus of the book is a handful of sailors stranded in the Port of Marseilles, this novel is the sort of uncompromising, dark exploration of human behaviour that fans expect from Izzo’s raw noir crime fiction.
When the novel begins, it’s been five months since the freighter Aldebaran, registered to a Cypriot owner, Constantin Takis, was seized as security for unpaid debts. This act leaves the sailors completely stranded and in dire straits. As time goes by, and the court case against Takis continues, the unpaid sailors find themselves living on the freighter with dwindling provisions and short tempers. When most of the international crew is finally paid off, Lebanese Captain Abdul Aziz remains with the freighter along with the Greek first mate Diamantis.
With a great deal of free time, inactivity and boredom, Aziz and Diamantis contemplate their lives, their failed marriages and the time spent at sea. Aziz’s career is built on a shameful secret and a moment in which he ignored principles and opted, instead, for security. This decision, based on expediency, eats away at Aziz’s conscience, but rather than deal with it openly, it remains destructively buried. Diamantis, on the other hand, decides to come to terms with his past, and the turning point in his life occurred in Marseilles twenty years earlier.
Stranded in Marseilles, Diamantis decides to take advance of the fact and search for the beautiful woman he loved and lost decades earlier. This decision requires a great deal of courage and self-examination, but Diamantis pursues the truth even though he realizes that he may pay for his search with his life.
Diamantis’s search of his lost love takes him into the very depths of the Marseilles underworld—the bars where lonely, sex-hungry sailors meet beautiful girls, life is cheap and few can afford principles. As with Izzo’s other novels, The Lost Sailors has the usual extraneous characters and lacks a strong focus, but those criticisms aside, Izzo once again offers his readers an unforgettable, unique slice of Marseilles life. While an exploration of the seamy side of Marseilles, and its continuing problems with racism and gentrification, The Lost Sailors also pays homage to those men who spend their lives on the sea—a dying breed of men who are lost and vulnerable on the land.
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Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)
- The Lost Sailors (September 2007)
- Sun for Dying (July 2008)
- Living Tires
Marseilles Trilogy:
- Total Chaos (Total Kheops 1995; 2005 in U.S.) (also released as One Helluva Mess in 2000 )
- Chourmo (1996; September 2006 in U.S.)
- Solea (1998; June 2007 in US
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Book Marks:
- Official website for the Jean Claude Izzo (in French)
- SlowFood on Jean Claude Izzo and his Marseilles
- MostlyFiction.com review of Total Chaos and Chourmo
- NovelWorld review of The Lost Sailors
- Guardian Blogs review of The Lost Sailors
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About the Author:
Jean Claude Izzo was born in Marseilles, France in 1945. His father was an Italian immigrant and his maternal grandfather was a Spanish immigrant. He excelled in school and spent much of his time writing stories and poems. But because of his “immigrant” status, he was forced into a technical school where he was taught how to operate a lathe.
In 1963, he began work in a bookstore. He also actively campaigned on behalf of Pax Christi, a Catholic peace movement. Then, in 1964, he was called up for military duty in Toulon and Djibouti. He worked for the military newspaper as a photograph and journalist.
He was a poet, playwright, screenwriter and novelist who achieved sudden fame in the mid-1990s with the publication of the Marseilles trilogy.
He died in 2000, of cancer, at the age of 55 years old.
