This review is part of a special week of pieces here at Strange Horizons which focus on speculative fiction in translation published by US small presses. These publishers are being impacted by the Trump administration's recent revocation of a number of grants made by the National Endowment of the Arts. Rachel Cordasco has compiled a list of works appearing in recent years from these houses. The health and breadth of speculative fiction relies on the work of these presses. Please support them and their work.

Ultramarine is published in the US by Deep Vellum.

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Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro’s 2024 novella, is a story shaped by emotions and reflections—images and language that flow at a smooth pace through a waving, surreal journey. Translated from French by Eve Hill-Agnus in 2025, the story, set in the modern age but with no clear date, follows a ship captain and her crew. Usually ruled by a strict routine, one day the sailors ask the captain to stop the ship to allow them to dive into and swim in the ocean for a bit. The captain agrees, though she doesn’t participate. The experience proves transformative in more ways than one: Previously a group of twenty men, once the sailors return they’re suddenly twenty-one. No matter how many times the characters count, there’s still one extra person on the ship, although no one can exactly identify who that is.

This is the setup for an uncanny, introspective story led by the ship’s captain, a nameless woman more comfortable at sea than on land. Efficient and practical, she is just as surprised as anyone when she agrees to the sailors’ request for a swim break:

She, who is always so careful about this, notices as she says the word that it has not had time to come from her stomach. It was born directly in her throat and hatched publicly: “Alright.” So, if her voice has spoken, she can only follow, as she is not in the habit of disagreeing with herself.

As the book’s opening scene, this moment sets the stage for the narrative to follow, in which characters’ bodies and minds sometimes find themselves at odds, as if outside forces are acting upon them for unknown reasons. There’s been a shift in something around the crew, and although they can’t pinpoint exactly what it was, their behavior transforms accordingly.

These outside forces are deeply connected to the environment. Ultramarine embraces the notion of the open sea as almost a different dimension, a place where both sailors and captain must understand themselves as something beyond the confines of earthly concepts. As the novella’s refrain, established in a brief prologue, goes: “[T]here are the living, the dead, and the sailors.” The sailors, those at sea, exist in their own category, and part of the narrative is their coping with this newly shaped existence and how it interacts with who they are on land. This goes double for the captain, who is separated from the rest of the crew by her position and her demeanor—she does not join the sailors in the infamous diving stop, but it affects her all the same.

Navarro’s prose, as rendered in Hill-Angus’s translation, proves essential for the flow of the narration to work. The language is simple but unafraid of the abstract, rich with feeling but never sentimental. The description of the sailors’ swim is perhaps the peak of this style, as the wavering of their senses of self never ceases to feel deeply intimate:

They dive one or two meters deep, hear their hearts beating in their temples, grasp another kind of silence. They’ve left the sounds of the earth and of the surface: they discover the music of their own blood, a drumming to the point of jubilation, percussion that could lead them to a trance. Dark sound of held breaths, symphony of lightness.

There is a lovely simplicity in the word choices, but also an airy quality given to these men’s identities as they alternately perceive themselves as one big unit, or profoundly alone. The swimming is both a moment of bonding and embrace, and of exposure to the sea’s unfathomable strength and depth. They “befriend death without crossing its border.”

But what about the return, with the mysterious new presence between them? The transition between spaces, between the ocean and the ship, suggests a mangling, a distortion of this collective identity, which creates a sense of tension and dread that permeates the entire story. It’s not quite horror, but there is a distinct discomfort in the idea of something minor being irrevocably out of place, an impossible-to-pin-down, newfound presence that irremediably alters a previously solid, reliable existence. The question isn’t about who or what has come into the ship, but about the way the addition alters everyone’s sense of safety. This uneasy feeling underlies each character’s every post-dive move.

This unease is exacerbated by the isolation inherent in the crew’s profession. This is particularly important for the captain: “She remembers that it’s never easy. That you don’t go from one category to another, as if from death to life, without losing some of your bearings and flexibility. She knows you’re not always welcome on the ocean’s back, that you can’t cling to its mane with impunity.” The animalization of the ocean in this passage is not unique—the ship, too, is perceived as a live entity, with a heart to which the captain attempts to reach out. Continuously, there is the sense of these characters as small beings in the hands of larger, more powerful creatures, fighting to cling to their own selves as their vulnerability becomes more and more obvious.

Even so, Ultramarine is not a pessimistic narrative. Throughout the novella, the theme of connection found in isolation comes up several times, a small glimpse of hope in the surreal landscape of trepidation.

There is, of course, the profound connection established between the sailors during their swim:

They call one another by their first names now, shout out to and congratulate each other. They feel affection for this one’s reddened skin, that suntan, that strand of tousled blond hair coming out of the water. […] They marvel over a perfect, round ear they’d never noticed before, would like to run their fingers through the wet hair of a sailor whose name they don’t even know, and to embrace each other—to say, today, that they love each other with a true love, with a crazy love, and who cares about the lovers left at port?

This is a connection the captain doesn’t share, a “silence that [isn’t] hers.” Rule-minded and efficient, she attempts to handle the situation with logic: She checks each sailor’s papers to try to find the intruder, fixates on one blond boy who seems to be the odd one out. Her strategies aren’t enough to face the issue. She is wrestling with her own loneliness and grief; only facing such feelings head-on can give her a chance to pull through them. She must resist her “exasperating habit of taking in the world from a soaring height.” She must dare to come closer.

Admirably, Ultramarine resists the notion of providing the reader with clear-cut, straightforward explanations for its slightly mythical, creepy elements. It’s a book that knows it thrives in sensation, not in structure. It is a brief but memorable read that feels precise and intentional in its handling of its themes. In embracing its fluidity, the novella creates an immersive, emotional experience for a reader willing to dive into its mixture of yearning, fear, and loneliness.