The Yellow Sailor

by Steve Weiner

This extraordinary novel, moodily operatic in tone and by turns hallucinatory and brilliantly detailed, follows the trajectories of four sailors and the owner of a German merchant ship, Yellow Sailor, which sets sail from Bremen in 1914. After the ship wrecks in shallow water, the men drift their separate ways, with each man's journey across a desolate wartime European landscape becoming an exploration of the failure of love, sex, religion, and friendship. Julius Bernai, owner of the ship and frankly homosexual, checks into an institute for nervous disorders and falls in love with the doctor's fiancée. Nicholas Bremml drifts: from the beds of numerous prostitutes to an oil tanker called Erwartung— Expectation—to Prague's Jewish market, where he sells magic spells. Brothers Karl and Alois are equally rudderless, and Jacek, the electrician, goes to work in the mines, where his love advice to a fourteen-year-old Polish boy precipitates a macabre murder.

Genres: Queer

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 29, 2001

About the author

Born in Wisconsin, now based in Vancouver, Steve Weiner studied writing and film animation in California. He is a contributor to The Clear Cut Future , a Clear Cut Press anthology. Weiner's first novel The Museum of Love was nominated for the Giller Prize.

"Mr. Weiner's fictional world has an affinity with the work of the writers Ben Okri and J. G. Ballard, the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin and the film makers Guy Maddin and Todd Haynes. But he is, one suspects, less a disciple of these latter-day Surrealists than a kindred spirit. Employing a dream logic that taps directly into the unconscious, he pushes narrative to the outer limits of what it can do."
(Michael Upchurch, New York Times)

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

An utterly bleak, yet strangely lush, WWI dystopian narrative. We can always use another well-written dystopian narrative. “Bleak and lush” – a partial definition of decadent.

The “Yellow Sailor” of the title is both a merchant marine ship and the flagrantly homosexual and wealthy captain of said ship. The ship runs aground and is irreparably damaged by the end of the first chapter, and the remaining chapters follow the crew as it scatters across war-torn 1914 Europe, a Europe defined largely by racial prejudice, erotomania (with emphasis on the homo- variety), and profound social disconnect. All lives end in madness or death, and though the characters do not rise into self-contained and 3-dimensional entities above the verbal surface, or the intense sensibility of the author, I still found a couple of their deaths, and moments of emotional pain, poignant. The writing is intentionally clipped, even nearly schematic, but laconically vivid and red-hot. There is an intensity I mostly missed initially, though there were enough hints of riches within the quickly flowing narrative that upon finishing it the first time I immediately turned back to page 1, and the second read made all the difference in the world.

The writing throughout is hard-boiled. Here’s an early paragraph:

Karl left. Nicholas showered. He touched his nipples. He came out dressed in a blue shirt and black trousers and went up the stairs. The Swede sat under a portrait of a man with black pommaded curls and spectacles.

After the surreal layered density of Weiner’s first novel, The Museum of Love, I was initially put off by this relatively unadorned writing and hurried through it, but then, as I said, I immediately reread it, and the second time through even simple sentences such as these began to resonate.

But then as the narrative unfolds it becomes increasingly hallucinatory, so that by the end the same hard-boiled approach has transformed into this:

The devil went by, holding a man’s scrotum inside out, like a little purse. A hairy masturbator ran out of ivy. Prager leaned over the grave. He shot himself.
“—o---Sklavenskelett---“
There was a blinding light.
“Why did it end as pornography?”

(Sklavenskelett is translated on the preceding page as “a chained skeleton”)

Steve Weiner did not disappoint on his second offering, though it took some adjusting to. Now on to his new book Sweet England!

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the stranger books I have read. If there was some kind of message in there, I didn't get it.