Viareggio Prize (Premio Viareggio / Premio Letterario Viareggio-Rèpaci)
S. S. Proleterka
Set on a Mediterranean cruise, the novel follows a fifteen-year-old girl as she measures the distance from her ailing father and the pull of a world she has not yet known. As memory overlaps with the present, family estrangement and the pain of growing up emerge with a cool, exacting force.
Work Information
One voyage becomes the beginning of a life.
Proleterka is set on a ship bound from Venice to Greece and traces the irreparable distance between father and daughter, as well as the moment when a girl steps into experience. Its short, tightly controlled sections move between the present voyage and the depths of memory, making absence itself feel intimate and immediate.
Review Summaries
-
The novel is valued for the way it tightens the tension between father and daughter through compressed prose. Its emotional density, hidden beneath a cold surface, gives the book its lasting aftereffect.
Book Information
- Publisher
- New Directions
- Published
- 2003-11-01
- Pages
- 144 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.21 x 1.02 x 20.57 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780811215503
- ISBN-10
- 0811215504
- Price
- 4399 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Family Saga
Compressed, delicate, but brutally precise, S. S. Proleterka is a fiercely boiled-down bildungsroman 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.
Fleur Jaeggy -- "a wonderful, brilliant, savage writer" (Susan Sontag) --was born in 1940 in Zurich and lives in Milan. Her work has been acclaimed as "small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused "(The New Yorker) and "addictive" (Kirkus).
Reviews
-
"It is for my own good. A venomous expression. But it sounds good. I know that that expression has never boded any good. Since then it has worsened my condition as a minor. You ought to watch your back when listening to diktats of this kind. When you are a hostage to good. A prisoner of good. ... I leave the house with a suitcase and my school bag. I have been consigned to others. For my own good." S. S. Proleterka will be my number #1 book of 2020. That is, unless I read another of Jaeggy's books and it displaces this short gem and pushes it to #2. I suspect that Proleterka resonates best with those of us whose childhoods and family experiences left us with a void that we cover well as we wander through the world, but that remains ever-present. Then again, anyone who loves language is likely to be equally besotted, even if he or she was raised by the most perfect, loving and encouraging of all parents. Sample quotes follow: "The man who says he is my father has understood that he must hold his peace. The silence of shadow. In his eyes a sweet and desolate expression. Toward the woman he calls his daughter. Toward things doomed to disappear." "More pictures. Collectors have pictures everywhere. They do not let the walls breathe." "His wife deprives herself of everything, even of herself. She has nibbled at her body, leaving the long teeth, when she shows them. She is withered, puritan and castigatory. She was the first person to observe Johannes’s daughter through the lens of contempt. She is abysmally polite. Hair gathered up into a lump, a chignon at the nape of her neck. Eyes dripping rapacious charity. Always kind." "As if fallen from the talons of a bird of prey in flight, thoughts drop into our mind when we are convinced that we are not thinking." "Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary. Some children look after themselves. The heart, incorruptible crystal. They learn to pretend. And pretence becomes the most active, the realist part, alluring as dreams." "He is not yet seventy years old. White hair, parted, straight. Pale, gelid eyes. Unnatural. Like a fairytale about ice. Wintry eyes. With a glimmer of romantic caprice. The irises of such a clear, faded green that they make you feel uneasy. It is almost as if they lack the consistency of a gaze. As if it were an anomaly, generations old."