By Tito Drago
MADRID, Jul 14 1998 (IPS)

Jose Sarney, former president of Brazil, senator, journalist and writer, has earned critical praise here, with the publication of his novel, ‘The Owner of the Sea’.

Sarney mixes legend and reality to evoke the life of his home in the northeast of Brazil in chronicling the lives of ordinary and people and expressing a kind of raw passion among the fishermen of Maranhao who appear with the protagonist, Cristorio, captain of the “Great Sea.”

Cristorio, from infancy, comes to know of the world of the spirit ships that sail in darkness, in shadows and the mysteries of the sea. He also meets his friend Querente, a soul in suspension, who emerges from the water and with whom he will confront many dangers on board his ship ‘Chita Verde’.

Spanish author and critic Juan Arias affirmed that the novel does not follow a conventional story line but finds itself among the best of the new books, precursors to the new millennium. It is “a world closer to mystery, to the magic of the supernatural, to the impalpable, to the movable and antidogmatic.”

The book leads us to “a world less constrained by ideology, less logical and more paradoxical and unpredictable, like the wind of the sea that can change the direction of the waves in a second,” the Spanish writer added.

Cristorio is a poor fisherman who desperately seeks a woman – the metaphor for happiness – in the seas. For this reason, it can be intuited that the new millennium will be both liquid and feminine, Arias observed.

Cristorio even considers his ship, “Chita Verde” as a woman, even to the point of saying that he would have liked to her to have his child. The fisherman speaks to her on all his trips; he strokes the rim of the boat, caresses it wooden planks, shows his love and remembers all the times he save the ship from danger.

At the formal book launching here, distinguished writers commented about the book including Brazilian author Jorge Amado who affirmed that, in Sarney’s novel, “the sequence of time is shuffled about, creating a time sequence made of memory and of life, a unique and inseparable time.”

“This book offers a magical and singular universe. It is the best novel I have read this year,” Amado said.

Brazilian writer Pedro Braga noted the book’s great sensuality, in which “the descriptions of the love relationships are done with poetry and subtlety.”

“Sarney utilizes rhetorical resources to describe scenes and erotic games, such as alliteration, homophony and metaphor,” he added. In the book, “the woman of sun-bronzed skin, only in a cotton slip and simple dress, suddenly is a seagull.”

Some words from the late Mexican Nobel Prize author Octavio Paz recalled Sarney when he was President of his country (1985-90), describing him as “a poet and defender of liberty.”

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