The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
In 1955 a Colombian naval destroyer was caught in a Caribbean storm, and Luis Alejandro Velasco spent ten days on a life raft without food or water before washing ashore. García Márquez, then a young journalist, reconstructed the ordeal in a series of newspaper articles so vivid that the government rewarded Velasco and then tried to forget the whole thing once his account embarrassed the navy.Published in book form by Knopf, the account is spare, almost reportorial, which makes the hallucinations, the sharks, and the small cruelties of survival land harder. It is an early glimpse of the writer who would later bend time and reality, here working within the stricter discipline of someone else's true story and proving that journalism can be as strange as fiction.
