Fleur Jaeggy 
Proleterka 

A fifteen-year-old girl and her father, Johannes, take a cruise to Greece on the Proleterka. Jaeggy recounts the girl’s youth in her distinctively strange, telescopic prose: the remarried mother, cold and unconcerned; the father who was allowed only rare visits with the child; the years spent stashed away with relatives or at boarding school. For the girl and her father, their time on the ship becomes their ‘last and first chance to be together.’ On board, she becomes the object of the sailors’ affection, receiving a violent, carnal education. Mesmerised by the desire to be experienced, she crisply narrates her trysts as well as her near-total neglect of her father. Proleterka is a ferocious study of distance, diffidence and ‘insomniac resentment’.

Over de auteur

Alastair Mc Ewen has published over 60 book-length translations, essays, articles, and poems, plus several feature film scripts and operatic librettos. He has worked with some of Italy’s finest living writers, including Baricco, Busi, Eco, Jaeggy, Tabucchi, and Veronesi.