Second Thermostat For Wood Boiler

Library of sea and coast


"All the stormy passions of humanity, ... are spent as reflections in a mirror, without a trace of the mysterious face of the sea. "
Joseph Conrad

I read these days is a short story by Ernesto Franco, "Usodimare. A story for solo voice ", published in 2007 by The Melangolo , finding the same fascinating and unusual sea air breathed in the first reading. I say unusual because Italians are very few novelists who have managed to restore the breath of the sea and the atmosphere on board. Different causes of this rare, when successful, attendance seamanship, beginning with the lack of knowledge of a world far from the historical land and even more than intellectual. To paraphrase the narrator of his book, the navigation is governed by autonomous laws, laws of nature, beyond the control of men. "
The protagonist, or rather its shadow, is Pepe Usodimare, solitary and mysterious commander who limps, not only physically, as the most famous commanders of the nineteenth century. We follow the last weeks of sailing aboard the Bahia Inutil , an old cargo ship to Bangladesh for scrapping. In a time suspended, marked by crossing with a fleet of catamarans ghost taken from a single macaque, by days of torrential rain and fierce dall'arrembaggio modern Piratas that refer to the epic adventures of Long John Silver and those concretissime of modern pirates. These, as Usodimare appointment, "have in common with yesterday's strategy of appearing from nowhere and from nothing and fade tactics never do the hostages. " A crew of Bahia to luck or the grace of an invisible underground, survived the attack and completes the final journey to "the endless beach of mud of Chittagong. But the real obsession Usodimare, which becomes one of each boat is tied to the search of "something" left by Nene, a woman who Pepe is "bound by a series of disincontri. ... the meeting that might have occurred. Indeed it would have happened. " A desperate search, which involves also the demolition until the last scrap, leaving only the "nail of God" who remains stuck in the stinking mud of this modern marine cemetery.