The Lost Sailors

By Jean-Claude Izzo

From one of France’s best-known authors comes this evocative meditation on the human comedy. A freighter is impounded in the port of Marseilles when its owners declare bankruptcy. On board, the men are divided: wait for the money owed them—money that might never come—or accept their fate and abandon ship? This may be Captain Abdul Aziz’s last commission and he is determined to save his charge and stand by his men. Diamantis, his second-in-command, is in search of a woman he has never stopped loving and who may now be living in Marseilles. In these close quarters charged with physical and emotional tension, each of these marooned sailors’ life stories begins to resemble a chapter in the complex, colorful, and tragic story of the Mediterranean Sea itself—rich with romance, legend, passion and drama.
 
The Lost Sailors is a richly textured and bittersweet tribute to Mediterranean life. It is the novel in which Jean-Claude Izzo most completely expresses his vision of human history and how it has been played out on the shores of this sea since the beginnings of time. This is a novel for anyone who loves the sea, for anyone who is attracted to the dark passions it can provoke, for anyone who feels drawn to the rich blend of races, religions and individual stories to be found in port cities the world over. It is, at the same time, a story of the prodigious forces at play in all human destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781609451714

Jean-Claude Izzo

Jean-Claude Izzo was born in Marseilles, France in 1945. Best known for the Marseilles trilogy (Total Chaos, Chourmo, Solea), Izzo is also the author of The Lost Sailors, A Sun for the Dying, and one collection of short stories, Living Tires. Izzo is widely credited with being the founder of the modern Mediterranean noir novel. He died in 2000 at the age of fifty-five.

Reviews for The Lost Sailors

[copyedit52 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I like Jean-Claude Izzo and this is a good story, though as another reviewer, somewhere, noted, it's a bit much when every woman he describes is beautiful, desirable, a Siren. And--not the author's problem--after reading the Marseille trilogy, I expected this would also be a mystery. There are mysterious elements in it, but it's most definitely not a whodunit: no detective and no crime (except the vagaries of life, stealing away with possibilities). But Jean-Claude is an evocative writer, and we get Marseille again, which I like, and he has some profound things to say, so I take away one star for the too beautiful women and call this a good Izzo book.