S. S. Proleterka
地中海クルーズの船上で、15歳の少女が病気の父との距離と、まだ知らない世界への衝動を見つめる物語。記憶の層が現在と重なり、家族の断絶と成長の痛みが冷ややかに浮かび上がる。
作品情報
ひとつの航海が、少女にとって人生の始まりへと変わっていく。
『Proleterka』は、ヴェネツィアからギリシャへ向かう船旅を舞台に、父と娘の取り返しのつかない距離感と、少女が経験へ踏み出す瞬間を描く。短い章の連なりが、旅の現在と記憶の深層を往復しながら、親密さの不在そのものを浮かび上がらせる。
レビュー要約
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父と娘の緊張を、圧縮された文体で静かに追い詰める点が高く評価されている。冷たさの奥にある感情の密度が、この作品の余韻を強くしている。
書籍情報
- 出版社
- New Directions
- 発売日
- 2003-11-01
- ページ数
- 144ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 13.21 x 1.02 x 20.57 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780811215503
- ISBN-10
- 0811215504
- 価格
- 4399 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 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).
レビュー
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"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."