Yellow Sailor — Steven Weiner

In this surreal & dramatic novel set at the dawn of World War I, a German merchant ship wrecks, and its crew of five drift their separate ways.

This extraordinary novel, moodily operatic in tone and by turns hallucinatory and brilliantly detailed, follows the trajectories of four sailors and the owner of a German merchant ship, Yellow Sailor, which sets sail from Bremen in 1914. After the ship wrecks in shallow water, the men drift their separate ways, with each man's journey across a desolate wartime European landscape becoming an exploration of the failure of love, sex, religion, and friendship . . .

Julius Bernai, owner of the ship and frankly homosexual, checks into an institute for nervous disorders and falls in love with the doctor's fiancée. Nicholas Bremml drifts: from the beds of numerous prostitutes to an oil tanker called Erwartung -- Expectation -- to Prague's Jewish market, where he sells magic spells. Brothers Karl and Alois are equally rudderless, and Jacek, the electrician, goes to work in the mines, where his love advice to a fourteen-year-old Polish boy precipitates a macabre murder . . .

Praise for The Yellow Sailor

“The Yellow Sailor has the calamity of Voltaire, the disillusionment and venality of Brecht, Kasinski's random horror, and Grosz's population of leering businessmen and hard-bitten prostitutes. . . . It's bold and unforgettable.” -- David Finkle, Trenton Times