438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea
By: Jonathan Franklin / Narrated By: George Newbern
Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
If Unbroken’s lost-at-sea gave you nightmares… whoo boy! Try this!
Seriously, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to handle 438 Days because when Unbroken’s Louis Zamperini and co. were in that small lifeboat, for what seemed like EONS, being burnt by the sun, surrounded by sharks? I honestly had a nightmare about it. How on earth could I handle four hundred and thirty freaking eight days of the same hell?
Then again, Lauren Hillenbrand wrote so well of that experience, would author Jonathan Franklin be able to get anywhere near the top notch writing that Hillenbrand did?
Might I say: YIKES! Yes, totally!
It starts benignly enough as we meet fisherman Salvador Alvarenga as a hand to mouth, live for today type of guy. He fishes hard, but he parties harder, drinking, toking up, and enjoying his food like crazy. But all that changes when the engine of his fishing vessel dies during a storm and the current drags him and a fishing mate far, far, far away from shore. He’s able to send one SOS, but that’ll be it for communication with the outside world for 438 days.
At first, most of his days are spent in trying to keep up the spirits of the one young man who is adrift with him, trying to get him to eat what Alvarenga catches with his bare hands or through some ingenious and resourceful methods. This can be fish, it can be bird (Which makes the mate deathly ill), or it can be Alvarenga’s favorite: Sea turtle.
It’s not a spoiler (Google it and see for yourself) that his friend gives up the ghost and dies during the ordeal. Alvarenga is relieved that now he can use his limited energy on survival for himself, but he’s also left completely and unutterably alone. He will talk to the corpse that he keeps with him, even as it decomposes and mummifies in the sun, and he will miss it when it is finally washed overboard during a delirium he suffers.
The book is full of how Alvarenga physically survives, but it’s at its most interesting when we hear of how he mentally survives, of how his spirit grows. He thinks of suicide often, until he doesn't. Rather, he takes the view that what will happen, will happen. And he wakes each day, ready to do what has become mundane: Eat what he can catch, suffer thirst while rationing the limited water he’s able to collect, talk to himself and tell himself how he’ll be a good father to the daughter he left behind so very long ago.
It doesn’t end when his ordeal at sea ends and he’s washed ashore, 9,000 miles and over a year away, on a small island. No, we see what happens when a man, isolated to the nth degree, one who has communicated glibly with a corpse, is met with the reality of civilization and a media on the hunt for a sensational story. THEN his will almost breaks, and his sanity is at its most fragile. It’s truly an extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary situation.
George Newbern, who sometimes can be a standoffish sorta narrator, does a good job here with his performance. Each day could’ve been profoundly boring, yet Newbern delivers what is new, what is seen with new eyes, or what is a new fresh hell; he’s entirely engaging in his narration. So Bravo, Mr. Newbern! I look forward to hitting some of the other titles in my Library that you’ve done the honors for.
My sister chose this for our little audiobook club, and we all really liked it and were really awed by the courage, the determination, the ingenuity, the hand of Fate. And my sister hit the internet to find out how things went after all was written.
You’ll have to Google it yourself to find the further trials and tribulations that met Alvarenga after his ordeal, after the writing of this book, and once others saw what pittance of money might come to them. I won’t tell you cuz I find it too disheartening after all the man suffered: Not all sharks are in the sea…
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.