num_pages: 122
description: 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."
language: English
title: S. S. Proleterka
titlecomplete: S. S. Proleterka
genres: Literary Fiction, Womens, Italian Literature, Novels, 21st Century, Italy, Coming Of Age, Fiction, Novella, Contemporary
ratings_count: 781
awards: awardedAt: 1577865600000
name: Europese Literatuurprijs, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Premio Vittorini, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Premio Letterario Viareggio Rèpaci
publisher: New Directions