Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine, translated from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus is an absurdist-charged novel that plunges readers into the depth of the human psyche at the brink of overwhelm and despair. Reminiscent of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Navarro’s narrative explores the discontent between mind and body and the alienation we experience when pushed to the limits: “She can’t say why the alloy between her body and the scrap metal is a protection, an insect’s shell just under her skin, an immense shield, or a lever meant to make her insights fluid, to denature her.”
The reader meets a protagonist, an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship who, despite a typical childhood of family, school, and love, always felt different, and prone to taking flight and disappearing. Crossing the Atlantic, the captain reflects on her ability to categorize people as either wanderers or settlers, and sees herself as belonging to the sea: “There are the living, the dead, and sailors. You can still be breathing and already be dead.” In a surprising departure from her usual discipline and ascribed protocol, the captain permits her crew of 20 men to shut off the engines and dive into the deep, open water. This impulsive decision ignites the story’s central conflict.
As a metaphor for the unexplored depths of the human mind and its desires, the sea prompts the characters to ponder if the water can connect their souls as their bodies play within it. As the crew enters the water, the ocean leaves no trace; unlike land, it doesn’t bear a mark but suggests that submersion entails becoming invisible. Diving, they experience a fleeting moment of liberation and euphoria, discarding their inhibitions as they embrace the freedom of the sea, “As they touch the water, they form a team in exaltation: this current they feel they spark with each movement could almost shine light on the ocean depths […] They’ll see if breath will follow, if silence will paralyze them, if their euphoria, here, will stand in for fins. To each his secret image of freedom, to each his own shock as he changes elements.” However, that joy soon gives way to fear and disorientation as they briefly become separated from one another and the ship, forced to confront the vastness and latent dangers of the ocean. The crew’s swim sets the reader up for the metamorphosis to follow: “They’ve left the sounds of the earth and of the surface: they discover the music of their own blood, a drumming to the point of jubilation, percussion that could lead them to a trance. Dark sound of held breaths, symphony of lightness.”
Meanwhile, the captain observes her crew’s excursion from the upper deck and struggles with her own reality; a burden weighs her down, fueling her desire to move more slowly as she “gives herself over to this stinking life, to diesel, the black blood of the animal that bears her on its back — this animal at once dead and alive, spitting like a human when it accelerates, howling when there’s phlegm rattling in its airways.” When the men return to the ship, their minds still adrift from that moment of freedom, the crew has inexplicably grown from 20 to 21.
What appears at first to be innocuous unleashes a series of disconcerting events — both real and imagined — that shatter the crew’s sense of order and control. Confronted with the unknown and devoid of inherent order or logic, the characters wrestle with profound existential questions about life, death, and the pursuit of meaning.
With failing instruments and conflicting weather reports, Navarro lures her readers to embrace the inscrutable through her inebriant lyrical style mirroring the rocking of the ship — qualities brilliantly captured in Hill-Agnus’ translation. The prose is heightened by tensions between the spiritual and elemental, contrasting the act of taking a breath and holding it. Not a word is wasted in a narrative saturated with subtext and imagery. As Damion Searls notes in The Philosophy of Translation, translation is “a rich and fascinating practice that sheds light on many facets of art and the human condition.” Hill-Agnus’ rendering of Navarro’s work for English readers demonstrates an exceptional ability to capture the essence of another’s creative mind.
The pursuit to solve the extra-sailor mystery plummets the captain into a labyrinth of doubt and uncertainty where the boundaries between reality and imagination increasingly blur: “She would be living in a perfect moment in which each element in her life took on a reassuring logic, if it weren’t for that wobbly odd number, a hurdle that slows her in her exasperating habit of taking in the world from a soaring height.” While the crew also grapples with the mystery of the additional sailor, the ship itself begins to display bizarre behavior. The engines inexplicably slow, and an unusual ghostly mist shrouds the vessel, further isolating the crew from the world outside. The sudden reduction in speed of the ship without technical or mechanical explanation mirrors the captain’s desire to slow down: “Sometimes she grows tired of the overly rational route they’ve taken between two points: she craves slowness.” The captain’s relationship with time throughout the narrative is noteworthy. It “seems as though it’s she who controls time, and that by slowing each gesture she can make this moment of solitude last forever.”
The strange occurrences on board signal the loss of control as if the ship were rebelling against the captain’s authority and asserting its own will. Already unsettled by the swim and the extra presence, the crew grows steadily more anxious and superstitious, questioning the nature of their reality. The mystery of the extra sailor and the ship’s odd behavior intertwine in the captain’s mind, seemingly edging her toward madness, underscoring the frailty of the human mind when confronted with the unknown. Despite her reputation as a strong and capable leader, the captain finds herself increasingly disconnected from her crew, experiencing moments of vulnerability and fainting spells. Her crew question her sanity and ability to maintain command of the ship. This loss of control amplifies the captain’s fixation with death as she imagines a dramatic end “at the mercy of the waves after years of wandering,” a life “abruptly abandoned,” the chilling image of “blood that curdles,” and the stark “certainty of a death without witnesses.” Even the crew, having faced their mortality during the dive, “reconnect with an immediate future…[having] encountered only their own limits and death laid bare with its white reflections.”
Recalling Kafka, Navarro’s protagonist experiences a bodily metamorphosis. Navarro’s early contrasting of skin with metal establishes it as one of the story’s most notable motifs: “To begin with, after the first few days aboard, a sort of mutation happens between flesh and metal, just as it’s said that plastic melds with fish at the bottom of the ocean. That’s what she thinks sometimes. A very slight evolution of the species A return to the sea’s depths,” and “There is, first of all, a change in the composition of her skin’s smell, the smell of her hands: a mix of grease and scrap metal, an ointment. What happens is chemical as much as mechanical.” Later, the captain penetrates her ship, moving from the tangible table beneath her fingers, through layers of flooring, and metal partitions, down to the engine room, and finally to the freighter’s innermost core until “the last floor takes on the golden-brown color of scales, and just below: a vast, living heart, an enormous piece of red flesh that contracts with a deaf pulsing and throbs out a beating amplified by the hull. She sees the blood that spurts from the heart.” She discovers a “heart beating under her own.” And as with Kafka’s Gregor, there is no mention in Ultramarine of any close friends or intimate relationships except for her protagonist’s father in whose footsteps she followed. The alienation caused by the captain’s “skin merging with the metal of the ship” appears as an extension of the alienation and estrangement she already felt as a person.
Ultramarine stands as a stimulating study of the human psyche, challenging readers to question the fabric of reality. While the story’s ending allows for interpretation, the captain’s emotional character arc leads to a satisfying conclusion, “And while she’s there, stretched out in the grease, cheek against the metal, in her coveralls that are a little too big, she feels lightand likely more unearthly than ever in body and spirit, certain that nothing bad will happen if only she asks herself the right questions, certain that the ship’s heart will keep beating in unison with her own for as long as she wills it.” Skillfully weaving together the tangible realities of the floating vessel with the inner landscapes of its characters, the novel creates an atmosphere of persistent unease and suspense, triggering contemplation of the delicate balance between order and chaos, while echoing the timeless human desire to understand our place in an enigmatic world.
[Published by Deep Vellum Publishing on March 4, 2025, 250 pages, $17.95 paperback]