2023-08-26 02:00:07
Before diving into a new story, David Grann begins by lowering the blinds in his office. From the quiet room where he works every day, from 8:30 a.m. until dinner, sometimes with a break to go for a walk around his house, the American writer dissects the piles of documents and archives that overflow from his library. and spread out on the floor. Before even writing the slightest line, this task occupied him for many months, sometimes years.
The feather of New Yorker, the most prestigious of American magazines, has thus already recounted a disastrous crossing in Antarctica, organized in the mid-2010s by an admirer of the explorer of the last century Ernest Shackleton; the racist murders ordered by a gang of white supremacists from high-security prisons in the United States; or even the investigation of a hardened cop who attacks a cold case in Poland and discovers that one of the suspects has opened up about his crime in a novel that has remained confidential. These incredible stories share one thing in common: they are all very real.
On this June afternoon, in his comfortable house in the New York suburbs, where he lives with his wife and two children, the 56-year-old author, round glasses on his nose, contemplates what could sum up his five last years of work: a hardcover book on the different types of ships in the British navy, old medical treatises on the amputation of a leg, a compilation of scholarly studies on the work of Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, and an account of the discovery of the calculation of longitude by an English clockmaker, which made it possible to reduce the number of shipwrecks (The Longitude Prize, ed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, untranslated). So many titles, among dozens of others, which served as a reference and inspiration for him to write The Castaways of the Wager, his fifth book, released on August 25 by Editions du Sous-Sol.
The same rigor as a press article
The subject of his investigation dates this time from 1740. At the time, a British navy ship launched after a Spanish galleon crashed on an island off the coast of Patagonia. In addition to damage and scurvy, a mutiny, several cases of cannibalism and a murder decimated the 250 crew members. Only a handful of sailors make it back to England, where a court-martial plans to try them for disobeying their captain’s orders. They risk being hanged.
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