Jason Pryde’s Reviews > Stories of the Sea > Status Update

“Now wakes the Sea” by J. G. Ballard is another Twilight Zone-like episode. It conflates mental illness with fantasy.
Pretty standard story line. Nice metaphor-rich description of the sea.

“John Marr” by Herman Melville was fitted to the chapter “Call of the Sea” but not that interesting. The whole story was summed up in the poem at the end which ended with the lines:
“To see you at the halyards main,
To hear your chorus once again!”

“The Young man With the Carnations” by Isak Dinesen In the chapter “The Call of the Sea”.

Complicated. More demanding of the reader. Requires several trips to Google Translate.

Stories within stories.

Disturbing.

“Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed” by Robert Olen Butler
A very different kind of short story. The sea plays a secondary role, more of a context for the spiritual journey of the protagonist.
Most sea stories are man vs. nature. This one is man vs. himself.
I suppose all Titanic stories are anecdotal of the human face of disaster.

Just finished “Youth” by Joseph Conrad. This story outshines all the others before it. Maybe it’s because he writes from personal experience more than imagination.

Completed first section, “Dangers of the Deep” which contained six short stories. Some from authors I would not have expected such as Edger Allen Poe (The maelstrom, we’ll researched but a bit wordy) and Ray Bradbury (The Fog Horn, classic mystery intrigue set on a lonely island but not a single martian.)