Ultramarine, by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Cory Stockwell, Héloïse Press, 2023
“There are the living, the dead, and the sailors.”
From the very first words of her short, poetic novel Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro restructures our expectations. We are entering another place where the rules of existence have changed. By challenging one of the most ingrained dichotomies of perception that we have—a person is alive or a person is dead—she begins to weave the shroud of mystery that is cast over the entirety of Ultramarine. The introduction of the sailor sketches out a third liminal space between our assumptions, destabilizing us and setting a tone of wonder and dread that will carry throughout the text. What could it possibly mean to be a sailor?
Our main character is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, her life fractured into two pieces. In one part, she lives on solid land, waiting uneasily for the moment when she will be reunited with crew and ship. The second part of her life is spent traversing the water, navigating the places between chunks of earth. Strict adherence to protocol has brought her success in a male-dominated career. She now manages a crew of twenty men and the portable world of her metal ship.
Then, one day, she briefly abandons her own protocol. The crew asks her to stop the ship for a few moments in the middle of the crossing so that they can swim naked in the deepest blue of the ocean. She doesn’t know why she agrees, but she agrees, and this one strange acquiescence sets off a chain of inexplicable events.
Instruments fail, weather reports are contradicted by reality, and the ship stops responding to navigation efforts. The literal engine that drives both the movement of the ship and the plot of the story is the anthropomorphized beating heart of the boat. As the ship slows down and wrenches agency away from humans, the story spins out of the control of the characters. Reality begins to unravel.
To reveal any more of the plot would be a disservice. Part of the pleasure of Ultramarine is the disorientation that the reader experiences when expectations are subverted. Mariette Navarro lulls her readers into accepting the unacceptable. The original French edition of the text earned the Prix du roman CEZAM 2023 and four other literary prizes, an even more impressive achievement considering that Ultramarine is Navarro’s first novel. She comes to fiction by way of poetry and playwriting.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that Navarro cut her literary teeth in another genre. Ultramarine feels like the work of a poet. It isn’t the kind of novel that hammers down linear plot points and works its way methodically through a narrative. Instead, the story roots itself in the perceptions of the characters and the almost gothic atmosphere. The shape of the novel feels circular, like a rose bud opening, and all the arresting poetic intricacies of Navarro’s prose vibrate throughout Cory Stockwell’s English translation.
Consider the texture of the language itself. Navarro casts a spell on her reader through breathtaking analogies that reframe the sailors as insignificant within the scope of the world they inhabit. As the captain watches her crew swim over the abyssal plain from the bridge of the ship, she “abandons herself to the spectacle of compositions they draw, quivering little points that spangle the blue ring.” The blue ring is the endless 360-degree unbroken horizon on all sides of the ship. The ocean all around, the miles of water beneath. If it is possible for language to trigger vertigo, surely this is it.
Several times throughout the novel, Navarro uses expertly curated lists to flesh out the world she’s created. When all the men are swimming and the captain is left alone on the huge cargo ship, she considers snooping through the rooms of her crew. She imagines inspecting “their toiletry bags to know everything about them: their deepest fears, their illnesses, their fragrances, their soaps, their razors, their anti-anxiety medications, their condoms, their toothbrushes, their creams, their superstitions, their magic balms, their fastidiousness, their disorder.” These lists, each composed of concrete items (razors, condoms) contrasted with abstractions (disorder, fears), bounce the reader between the depth of a character’s inner experience and the mundane items of quotidian life. Just by placing these words side by side, Navarro stitches the abstractions onto the physical and colors her setting with the ethereal.
Further abstracting her work, Nazarro made the decision to rinse her characters of names. Ultramarine is written in an intimate, close third person point of view that stays with the captain for most of the novel, but at times switches into the mind of the chief mate or the collective consciousness of the crew as a whole. What happens to a novel when the people that inhabit its pages remain nameless? The captain has all the specifics of a fleshed-out character—backstory, motivation, a particular worldview rooted in ritual, a groove that she has worn into her days by the repetition of her own actions. But the captain doesn’t have a name. At one point, she gives voice to this frustration when she asks another sailor: “What is your name?”
This question remains unanswered, for both the captain and the reader. A name is a boundary, a wall, a sharp pen and ink differentiation that happens between characters and readers. We expect our characters to have names. In a way, a name is a comfort. It keeps us all in our own places. Without names, without this most basic, universal marker of distinct personhood, Navarro creates a different kind of liminal space, but this one exists in the smudged gap between the reader and the characters.
Like in a fable or a fairytale peopled with foxes and princesses, the unnamed characters of Ultramarine remain blurred around the edges. It’s unsettling. We feel as though we could be the captain, even though we are not. We fear that perhaps we are also sailors, whatever that means. We wonder if our own methods of control over our environments are also illusions that could break down at any moment. With Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro gives us an eerily beautiful portal into the submerged depths of our own interior worlds. She reminds us of our own littleness, of our insignificance within the spaces we navigate.
Among the cast of unnamed sailors, the fully uppercase title of Ultramarine seems to be shouting for attention. Ultramarine, the substance itself, is a once highly sought-after paint color originally derived from the stone lapis lazuli. Since the stone was only mined in one place in Northern Afghanistan, the color was dubbed “ultramarine” or “beyond the sea.” Renaissance painters were completely dependent on sea trade to procure the blue they needed to paint the robes of the Virgin Mary. In his blog post “True Blue” for the Paris Review, artist and writer Ravi Mangla quotes Kandinsky on the mystique that still surrounds the color blue: “The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural.”
The word “blue” is often the last color to enter a language. Despite being set on the sea, Homer’s Odyssey, the classical predecessor of Ultramarine, has no reference to the color blue. The “Why isn’t the Sky Blue” episode of the podcast Radiolab dives into the way language and perception of the world intersect around the color blue. Jad Abumrad speculates that “if Homer had no word for blue and the word somehow enables the blueness of the blue, then maybe his world was less blue than it would be for us. I mean, maybe the blue went through his eyes in the same way, but it perhaps didn’t get into his mind in the same way.”
Mariette Navarro makes sure that the blue burrows deep into our minds. In the acknowledgments, we learn that she began Ultramarine during a writer’s residence on board the ship Fort Saint-Pierre about a decade ago. Maybe it’s because the novel was born within the personal experience of the author, but as a reader, it feels more experiential than most books. Even now when I think of the sailors spangling themselves over the waters of the ocean, those tiny human heartbeats in an endless expanse of sea and sky, my own heartbeat speeds up and secondhand adrenaline shoots off in my body in response to confronting the infinite, incomprehensible, impenetrable blue of Ultramarine.
Annilee Newton teaches and writes in Austin, Texas. Her essays appear in the Sierra Nevada Review, the anthology Family Stories from the Attic published by Hidden Timber Books, and on Dirty Spoon and PenDust Radio podcasts. She has an MFA in Writing from Lesley University.
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