Tides Advance, Tides Retreat

Serene, seductive, buoyant, and seething in turn, Hugo Clemente’s Water Log is ever shifting and always beautiful, like the ocean that features as both character and landscape in this fragmented narrative. It has been called poetry, a novel, a love story, a travel log — and while it is these things, it’s also a celebration of the nomadic surfer’s lifestyle and a keen-eyed critique of those who inhabit and visit the Canary Islands.

The unnamed speaker, whose voice carries the meandering story as he is carried by surfboard, van, and airplane, weaves together events that take place on the shores of the Canary Islands and on the mountains of southern Spain, giving the reader a sense of endless travel. Far from giving the impression of an aimless wanderer, though, the storyteller takes pains to ensure this understanding: “The Island,” despite its dangers and complications, will always call him back. In chapter nineteen, he says “I went back to the beach, we always go back…. The water was cold, a kind of warning, the sun was poking out from behind a couple of bloated clouds. I got into the water, I always go in.” Instead of sheltering from the coming storm, he surfs while it swirls above him, “[catching] some waves that will forever live on in some intangible place of memory.” He is not a “surfer” in Bermuda shorts worn over underpants, posing dry in the sunlight for other men to admire. He surfs because he is called to the ocean, because “Everything is water or its absence.”

Water Log is sophisticated environmental literature, highlighting how the tourism industry charges careless visitors to destroy natural resources and native beauty. In chapter sixteen, “The Stillness of Junk,” the speaker descends a path to the beach with his friend Eric. The path is “littered with trash, odd sandals and abandoned underwear,” the land is “filled with the shit of dogs and cigarette butts.”

Later, in chapter sixty-seven, Eric is picking up garbage on the beach with his son, and the speaker comments that “Eric still couldn’t understand how some people could claim The Island, the beach, the waves as their own at the same time as they covered it all over with their shit.” They refer to one of their beach spots as “The Sewer,” and a wrecked car there slowly being eaten by the ocean functions as both a metaphor for human negligence and for the water’s tenacity.

The triplet plagues of colonialism, nationalism, and racism descend on the narrative in the form of “Crooknose,” with whom the speaker first gets into an altercation at the local airport. Afterward, they meet again at the beach, where Crooknose challenges the speaker’s right to be there, even to exist. As the speaker paddles peacefully into the water, Crooknose yells “You fucking barbarian, you godo! Get the hell out of here, you son of a whore. I’m sick of all of you!” Crooknose continues with a flurry of hate, calling the speaker a “foreign shit,” saying “I don’t want to see you anymore, this is my spot, my beach, my wave, my people, my ocean, my island, and we don’t want any stinking foreigners here.” Like so many others who claim what isn’t theirs, then deny other immigrants and refugees access, Crooknose is what the speaker calls “a Teuton grandson of some ambulance driver for the Third Reich in the Great War II who, after the surrender, fled all the way to this place.” And what bully would be complete without sycophants? Crooknose travels with an entourage.

Clearly not one to shy away from social issues, Clemente portrays characters who are among the growing demographic of the working poor. Water Log’s speaker is at first a flight attendant, but when he moves to mainland Spain, he hops from job to job, never quite making ends meet. He and his roommate, Ruben, cannot afford to heat their home and often turn to...