The Slow and Lonely Shipwreck by Herbert Clyde Lewis, artist and unfinished man

“Gentiluomo in mare” is a story in crescendo, a great lesson for those who believe that to tell stories you need amazing inventions and that you cannot say lightly, capital letters

Ten chapters to sink. “Gentleman at Sea” Of Herbert Clyde Lewis (Adelphi, pp. 152, euro 13) is just this: the whole life that passes before the eyes of Mr. Henry Preston Standish, who fell into the waters of the Pacific in his beautiful classic suit after thirteen days and nights of navigation, from the lower deck of the steamer Arabella from Honolulu and bound for the Panama Canal. Fallen with an unseemly carelessness for a gentleman like him, a respectable guest of a life that is a background buzz, a buzz of the obvious and the convenient; he so graceful, exquisitely composed and faded as a gray; he, sensible head of Wall Street, so reassuring and moderate in everything, in loving and in making love (strictly with his wife, mother of his two children), the last and most recent outcome of a generation of very urban Standish and never screaming, if anything fiddling, indeed, fiddling, thanks to an evolutionary modification of the trumpet of the larynx into a musical instrument. What unforgivable carelessness, like a pathetic clown slipping on a grease stain… To be ashamed. And in fact we know, “falling from a ship is much worse than overturning a waiter’s tray or stepping on a lady’s train.”