Call number
Genres
Collections
Publication
Description
Compressed, delicate, but brutally precise,S. S. Proleterka is a fiercely boiled-downbildungsroman from the presiding genius of dry-ice, Fleur Jaeggy. The S. S.Proleterka is a Yugoslavian ship; our fifteen-year-old protagonist and her financially ruined, distant, yet somehow beloved father, Johannes, take a cruise together on it to Greece. With a strange telescopic perspective, narrated from the day she receives her father's ashes, our heroine recounts her youth: her re-married mother, cold and far away, allows the father the rare visit to the child, stashed away with relatives or at a school for girls. "The journey to Greece, father and daughter. The last and first chance to be together." On board the S. S.Proleterka, she has a violent, carnal schooling with the sailors: "I had no experience of the other part of the world, the male part." Mesmerized by the desire to be experienced, she crisply narrates her trysts as well as her near-total neglect of her father. A ferocious study of distance and diffidence,S. S. Proleterka bottles at one hundred and eighty proof the "insomniac resentment" and cyclical nature of familial pain. Jaeggy's distillation of childhood is brought into English with telegraphic urgency by Alastair McEwen, the acclaimed translator of Umberto Eco and Alessandro Baricco, and the emotions pressed out between Jaeggy's lines are enough to fill a tome of a thousand pages.… (more)
User reviews
There are also great similarities between the two books in terms of content: the absent mother (she’s in Argentine), the distant and very passive father, and the young girl who wants to taste life, but cannot break out of the cocoon of emotions she has been put in from early on. The scene in Proleterka is not a boarding school in Switzerland, but a Yugoslav cruise ship on the Mediterranean, where the girl can exceptionally spend 14 days with her father. But the atmosphere is just as intense and oppressive as in the Swiss school. All the characters around her seem to be waiting out life, in many cases even opting for death. And even though the story telling protagonist tries to get a taste of life, the distance to other people remains, it’s impossible to get some warmth and be close to someone else. Once again there is a huge haze of sadness and gloom about this story. "Proleterka" is cleverly written, but it’s a chilling reading experience. (I read this in the original Italian, I don't know whether the translations breathe the same atmosphere)