On 'Ultramarine'

Like all tales of the sea, Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine is really a story about trade, and it is so in a threefold sense: (1) trade as commerce, the movement of goods across vast distances in a global marketplace; (2) trade as profession, here raised to the level of a calling; and (3) trade as bargain, as in the countless folktales of mariners pledging their souls to the devil in exchange for gold or safety in a storm. In this novel, the bargain is less a matter of the soul than of the body, of the sovereignty over one’s body that the sailor signs away in exchange not only for wages but for another, less tangible object—a certain slippery notion of freedom, the contours of which this essay will trace.