The Yellow Sailor

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.