Description from Goodreads
Our fifteen-year-old protagonist and her distant, financially ruined, yet somehow beloved father, Johannes, take a cruise together to Greece on the SS Proleterka. With a strange telescopic perspective, narrated from the day she suddenly decides she would like to receive her father’s ashes, our heroine recounts her youth. Her remarried mother, cold and far away, allowed the father only rare visits with the child who was 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 SS 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. SS Proleterka is a ferocious study of distance, diffidence, and "insomniac resentment."My Thoughts on the Book
S. S. Proleterka is in a sense one of those books that could make you think a little bit. There's something about the distant and neglectful father and a daughter who wants to be seen and/or feel some kind of validation from the so-called father figure, but ends up getting the attention elsewhere so to speak. If it's a good thing or a bad thing, is of course up for discussion.
It's anyway a tale of a vaping wound, and the psychological consequences and the lasting impact of child neglect. S. S. Proleterka is because of that, obviously unpleasant to read at times, but it should perhaps be read precisely because of those topics.
Comments
Post a Comment