The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
Gromer, Crystal
questions, though profound, are not religious. How did the universe come to be here? What will happen to it? No one with a sense of past or future can fail to be stirred by those questions...
...I was in black space, suspended, or as it were with one eye open above some surface, one below...
...Her article "Two Is Not Enough," appeared in the May 4, 1990, Commonweal...
...To no less purpose and with no less skill does the narrator of John Barth's retelling of part of Scheherazade's repertoire, the seven voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, interweave those stories with the stories of his own life's voyages, seeking to find which name among the many he's given, which self among the many that he's been, he is...
...The narrator's first loss came with his first voyage, for though he followed his twin sister into this world, he lived and she did not--not even long enough to merit a name...
...Like his predecessor the Porter in Scheherazade's version, this new Sindbad is summoned to his namesake's court when he is overheard singing his complaint: We all commence our journey as a little sperm and egg...
...Includes examples of Islam's contributions to science, art, medicine, architecture and literature...
...DON WYCLIFF is deputy editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS is editor of Commonweal...
...No one with a sense of past or future can fail to be stirred by those questions and the story of how modern scientists pursue them...
...I want you to be somebody...
...Even once he is in this world, he is at sea--figuratively always, and literally often enough...
...This is John Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera, and many more), after all, and his hero is variously exuberant, obnoxious, funny, self-conscious, and, not sober at all, but thoroughly intoxicated with sex, love, and story telling, especially with their commingling...
...For this narrator there can't be too much commingling...
...some die before they've lived a day...
...You will learn a great deal about what is known about the universe...
...There was no Once upon a time," the embryonic Somebody says of the stories he told his twin sister because "our language had no tenses...
...The story that points past itself, Barth reminds us, can also be a really good story...
...Not that he means to...
...He has made a name for himself, but it fit no more than the others, and so he is, after all, Somebody...
...Though successful enough as a writREVIEWERS WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS teaches political science at Rutgers University...
...Some plot the course and give commands that others must obey...
...17 May 1991:341 Yet some wind up as millionaires, while others have to beg...
...DAVID BENSMAN is co-author, with Roberta Lynch, of Rusted Dreams: Hard Times in a Steel Community (University of California Press, 1988), and teaches labor studies at Rutgers University...
...Loss haunts this book, which is what gives it its power...
...The rotable bezel of his Seiko (a bargain at a tax-free port) is his magic carpet, sending him back, mid shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, to the Iraq presided over not by Saddam Hussein but by the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, where, though wealth is still counted in jewels, the world is not innocent, and where stories are the order of the day---or night...
...He crosses oceans, he crosses centuries in his search...
...He has a long job of it...
...she is only B.G.(for Baby Girl) Behler, or Bijou to her twin...
...Overbye's engaging and insightful book is guaranteed to provide the general reader with a good base from which to appreciate the progress and the surprises that are no doubt in store in the years ahead...
...Living and reading and in need of as much medicine, articulate and otherwise, as we can get in this life, we are the benefactors of a surprise legacy: stories cheerful and moving, ever inventive, c l e v e r as Scheherazade's...
...7_ 342: Commonweal...
...JO McGOWAN is a free-lance writer...
...And yet of course he is never really alone because he is always telling his story, his audience as fictive and as real as himself...
...Crystal Gromer he Arabian nights were only as long as Scheherazade was clever, and she was very clever as it turned out, keeping death one night away by telling stories whose endings she promised the next night, and then the next, and the next--until there were a thousand and one nights, a thousand and one stories, and death had slipped away, an ending no longer necessary...
...As a child, the narrator found another and inarticulate consolation through rocking himself: "Ever so slightly, ever so lightly, I rocked, and it was not long before I reached that state between two worlds where distances go strange and the familiar is no more...
...Within the frame, the novel unfolds in alternate chapters,with alternate narrators and alternate times: the "present" of Sindbad's court, when he describes his famous voyages for his dinner guests, and the "past" of Somebody, this fifty-or-so-year-old-man who has been William Simon Behler, Simmon, Persimmon, Simon, Sy, William Baylor, Bill, B., Bey-el-Loor, Sindbad the Still-Stranded, and who is now playing Sindbad the Landman to Sindbad the Sailor...
...48 pp...
...On the one hand, we have islands that are really whales, giant birds and the giant birds' eggs that go with them, giant diamonds and the giant serpents that go with them, cannibals, mad comrades and mad kings...
...If the setting is sober, the narrator is not...
...But in place of palace, we have hospital...
...To Allah this makes perfect sense...
...His most recent book is The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Norton...
...Again like his predecessor--of course, he has the advantage of a long-time fascination with The Thousand and One Nights and so he knows his part--he asks Sindbad to recount his tales, which we get together with morals, commentary, and other diversions, even other narratives, in a series of interludes which decrease proportionately as the voyages increase...
...Something he has sought his whole life for in stories and in words--he tries out many stories, and he tries out many words for them--eludes him still in the conscious world...
...Oh my friends, what medicine it is to tell our stories," Sindbad the Sailor exclaims at one point in his narration...
...CHRISTOPHER LASCH teaches history at the University of Rochester...
...NANCY M. HAEGEL is an associate professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles...
...4.95 At bookstores, denominational supply houses, or directly from: FRIENDSHIP PRESS Distribution Office P.O...
...It is his fate to survive almost as many drownings as the legendary Sindbad, and to see, beginning with his sister, the women in his life, mostly auburnhaired, mostly green-eyed, the women who are the other half of his own self, swim away from him, leaving him to survive, but to survive alone...
...This is the rocking of birth, of sex, of the sea...
...4.95 ONE GOD, TWO FAITHS When Christians and Muslims Meet A Study Guide on the World of Islam By Sarah Klos Six excellent sessions combine participatory activities, clear instructions and useful resources for adult and older youth study groups...
...in place of Prince Shahryar, modern medicine--figured (well-figured) in a resident: auburn-haired, green-eyed, available--and a born listener...
...From each voyage Sindbad draws great wealth and four discernible morals...
...He narrates his childhood to her, as, he maintains, he had told her stories in the slippery liquid world they shared before birth...
...They are not so different, the lines we would draw between them no more solid than those we would draw betwee~a past and present, and our narrator knows both times at once, as he lives in two worlds at once and speaks (at least) two languages at once...
...L SINDBAD THE SAILOR II THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR John Barth Little, Brown, $22.95, 573 pp...
...5.95 (5th Printing) NEIGHBORS Muslims in North America Interviews by Elias D. Mallon Neighbors shatters the stereotypes of fear and suspicion as Muslims in North America talk in lively interviews about their families, their work, and their spiritual journeys...
...Orders under $25 must be prepaid...
...Autobiography, fiction, travelogue, adventure, romance, fable: the tales of the voyages parallel each other, until, more parable than parallel, they converge into the one story...
...On the other hand, we have William Simon Behler's birth, childhood, and adolescence, the journalist William Baylor's career, marriage, affairs, the now lost Somebody's losses, griefs, and loves...
...CRYSTAL GROMER teaches humanities at Vermont Technical College...
...it is the rocking of death...
...And though, by his story's end, he has won a jade-eyed princess, he cannot close with living happily ever after...
...Nor, Western infidel that he is, lost in foreign Islam, can he say, Amen...
...er to have lived comfortably and to have embarked with his auburn-haired, greeneyed lover (more lost than he in the Indian Ocean) on the adventure of retracing Sindbad's route, our Somebody cannot even find a name, much less a moral...
...And, if you don't know exactly how old the universe is or how it will end, you will find it both comforting and challenging to realize that, even among the best minds, you are not alone...
...and he must slip away to find it, past language, finally past life...
...Box 37844, Cincinnati, OH 45222-0844 (513) 948-8733 Direct orders add $1 shipping per book...
...some are cast away or lost at sea...
...48 pp...
...144 pp...
...Some reach safe harbor...
...I wish it did to me...
...Each night for six successive nights, the narrator, a pseudo-Sindbad, a Somebody the Sailor, and his host, Sindbad the Sailor himself, tell the stories of their voyages...
...Make a name for yourself," his father had urged him as a boy...
...Like Scheherazade, our twentieth-century narrator narrates against the hand of death...
...Living and narrating, the narrator uses stories as his medicine--until, like Scheherazade, he needs them no longer...
...To say the point of our Somebody's story -telling is to move past storytelling at all is just like saying that the point of life is death: yes and no, or no and yes...
...Some live a hundred years...
...THE WORLD OF ISLAM GOD I S ONE The Way of Islam By R. Marston Speight Highlighting the common factors as well as the important issues of faith and life that divide us, God Is One confronts barriers to understanding the Islamic way with concern and accuracy...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
