I recently read THE THIRD REALM by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard which came to me as does much of what I read through BookBud. It has excellent reviews.
The reader is presented with parts named after individuals. We have a married woman painter with three children who is mentally ill and given to psychotic episodes; a high school teacher who thinks his wife is having sex with another man; a world famous architect who in his early sixties fears that his creatively is gone; a nineteen year old girl who is attracted to a handsome and charismatic man in his mid-twenties who the first time they have sex shallowly slices his and her chest with a knife, although she flees from him, she finds she has become pregnant and decides to have the baby and to continue the relationship; an eminent neurologist who is called to examine a man who was brain dead but somehow came back to life; a police detective who is investigating three ritual murders; a woman member of the clergy who doesn't believe in God; and a few more.
There is a bright star that suddenly appears in the sky and as suddenly disappears. During the five or six nights it is visible no on dies in the entire country of Norway.
There is a lot of talk about the Devil.
And on one page there is: "The first Realm is that of God. The second Realm is that of Christ. The third Realm is the age of the Holy Spirit. We've entered the Third Realm."
I read all five hundred pages of THE THIRD REALM. I found it to be well written and interesting and I kept hoping that eventually it would make sense. It never did, so with relief I turned to a book that does make sense, THE OCEAN WAITS.
Editors have never much edited me. I like to believe that is because I give them words that don't need editing. But occasionally they have changed titles for the better. They did with THE OCEAN WAITS. I had simply titled the book, THE OPEN BOAT: ACROSS THE INDIAN OCEAN, though in fact it covers the voyage from when with the kind assistance of Honnor Marine I put CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE back together in what is now Vanuatu after our two week drift following her pitch-poling in 1980 in the Pacific to my being jailed as a spy in Saudi Arabia in 1982. In the Kindle edition I added CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE 2 covering my resumption of the voyage in 1983 in the Red Sea to its end at Santa Cruz de la Palma in the Canary Islands later that year.
I was sailing RESURGAM from Portugal to the Caribbean to The Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific in 1984 when the book was published and did not know the publisher had changed the title until I finally got a copy of the book in Tahiti. As you may know the title comes from one of my poems and I think the publisher's title far better than mine.
I enjoyed the first part of the book about the sailing in 1980 and 81 from Vanuatu to Australia to Bail to Singapore. I have remembered that CT had several noon to noon runs of between 140 and 150 nautical miles, but never quite reached 150. From the book I learned that her best day's run was 148 miles and her best week's run was 861, both set on the wonderful trade wind passage from Port Vila, Vanuatu, to Cairns, Australia, and quite respectable for an 18' open yawl.
I did not enjoy the last part of the book which describes the events of 1982, one of the most despairing years of my life. I did make that year what is perhaps still the longest non-stop open boat passage of all time--4,058 miles in 47 days from Singapore to Aden. Then after only four days rest, when I learned my grandmother was dying, I sailed another 700 miles in 14 days of gale and calm to Port Sudan.
The southern entrance of the Red Sea is the Bab el Mandeb, the Strait of Sorrows, and for me it truly was. My grandmother, who was the only family for whom I cared or who cared for me, died before I could see her; Suzanne and I separated and were divorced; and I was jailed in Saudi Arabia on suspicion of being a spy.
I will include more from and about THE OCEAN WAITS in future entries.
The photo above was taken after I returned to Port Vila with Suzanne, two months after I reached land after drifting for fourteen days in a 9' inflatable. I paid another yacht to go the forty miles north to Emae Island on which CT and I both reached land and tow the hull back to Port Vila, where one morning Suzanne and I walked along the dusty road leading out of the town and found three suitable fallen tree limbs which I rowed out to the anchored hull. I set up one in the position of the main mast, a second in the mizzen bracket, and tied the third between them as a ridge pole for the tarp we used as a cockpit tent, under which we lived for almost two months until the spare masts and sails and floorboards and rudder and oars reached us. We were, I wrote, under full twig.
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