DDC/MDS
| 813.52 |
Publication
Boston : Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1962.
Original publication date
1962
Description
Katherine Anne Porter's first and only novel is a masterful allegory of the passions and prejudices that sparked World War II August 1931. An ocean liner bound for Germany sets out from the Mexican port city of Veracruz. The ship's first-class passengers include an idealistic young American painter and her lover; a Spanish dance troupe with a sideline in larceny; an elderly German couple and their fat, seasick bulldog; and a boisterous band of Cuban medical students. As the Vera journeys across the Atlantic, the incidents and intrigues of several dozen passengers and crew members come into razor-sharp focus. The result is a richly drawn portrait of the human condition in all its complexity and a mesmerizing snapshot of a world drifting toward disaster. Written over a span of twenty years and based on the diary Katherine Anne Porter kept during a similar ocean voyage, Ship of Fools was the bestselling novel of 1962 and the inspiration for an Academy Award-winning film starring Vivien Leigh. It is a masterpiece of American literature as captivating today as when it was first published more than a half century ago. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Katherine Anne Porter, including rare photos from the University of Maryland Libraries.… (more)
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Available
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User reviews
LibraryThing member ursula
The year is 1931, and the action of the book takes place on or within sight of the Vera, a ship departing from Veracruz, Mexico for Europe, with its ultimate destination being Bremerhaven, Germany. The majority of the upper-deck passengers are German, as is the crew, and we follow along with quite
Wikipedia says, "The ship of fools is an allegory that has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. The allegory depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction." And indeed, deranged, frivolous and oblivious are apt descriptors for the passengers of the Vera. A passage where a character thinks, "You might learn something about one or two persons, if you took the time and trouble, but there was not time enough and it was not worth the trouble..." clearly extends beyond the confines of the ship to castigate the world at large for its indifference. As humans, we are often careless with each other and too self-involved to see the consequences our actions (or more often inactions) are likely to have, and the undercurrents that shaped World War II are apparent in passengers' attitudes and in events on board. Generalizations and assumptions based on nationality and appearances run rampant; few are challenged or corrected through the course of the book.
I'm not usually a big fan of allegory, as I often find it heavy-handed, and this book is no exception. I was interested in a number of the characters and quite liked the close quarters as a means for forcing confrontation, but I found the overall effect to be ponderous as your choices in reading didactically are between a story that doesn't really go anywhere (even though the ship does) and being preached to.
Recommended for: fans of Orwell's Animal Farm, people who believe Lord of the Flies tells the truth about human nature, non-claustrophobes, anyone who thinks "hell is other people."
Quote: "We will go on for a while, and it will be worse and worse, and we will say and do more and more outrageous things to each other, and one day we will strike the final death-giving blows. There is nowhere to go back and begin again with this...there is no place to go. The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday -- oh where did David go, I wonder? The place you are going towards doesn't exist yet, you must build it when you come to the right spot."
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a number of the people aboard. Among the Germans, we have an alcoholic professor and his long-suffering wife, a timid woman recently widowed (she is returning to Germany with her husband's body, in fact), a hunchback, a Jew, and an old dying man who is being angrily cared for by his nephew. Of other nationalities, there are Cuban students, a Spanish company of dancers, a disgraced Spanish Contessa who is being transported as a prisoner, an uncouth American man, an 18-year-old Swiss girl made miserable by her parents, and a couple of Americans who have been living together in Mexico and spend most the voyage arguing over where they should go next. At first, the array of characters is a little dizzying, and there is a useful list of everyone at the front of the book, including who they are cabin-mates with. Eventually though, you get to know them and their personalities. Wikipedia says, "The ship of fools is an allegory that has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. The allegory depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction." And indeed, deranged, frivolous and oblivious are apt descriptors for the passengers of the Vera. A passage where a character thinks, "You might learn something about one or two persons, if you took the time and trouble, but there was not time enough and it was not worth the trouble..." clearly extends beyond the confines of the ship to castigate the world at large for its indifference. As humans, we are often careless with each other and too self-involved to see the consequences our actions (or more often inactions) are likely to have, and the undercurrents that shaped World War II are apparent in passengers' attitudes and in events on board. Generalizations and assumptions based on nationality and appearances run rampant; few are challenged or corrected through the course of the book.
I'm not usually a big fan of allegory, as I often find it heavy-handed, and this book is no exception. I was interested in a number of the characters and quite liked the close quarters as a means for forcing confrontation, but I found the overall effect to be ponderous as your choices in reading didactically are between a story that doesn't really go anywhere (even though the ship does) and being preached to.
Recommended for: fans of Orwell's Animal Farm, people who believe Lord of the Flies tells the truth about human nature, non-claustrophobes, anyone who thinks "hell is other people."
Quote: "We will go on for a while, and it will be worse and worse, and we will say and do more and more outrageous things to each other, and one day we will strike the final death-giving blows. There is nowhere to go back and begin again with this...there is no place to go. The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday -- oh where did David go, I wonder? The place you are going towards doesn't exist yet, you must build it when you come to the right spot."
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LibraryThing member plenilune
In Ship of Fools Porter created and managed dozens of detailed, utterly flawed characters engaged in the tedious everyday minutiae of lives in suspension. This is a nuanced portrait of a time and its people, largely ignorant of the future into which they are cornering themselves. There is as much
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or more between the lines as there is in the words and minds of each passenger and staffperson on the ship. This is a writer's novel, a tough read but recommended. Anyone with a gift for or a love of fiction will recognize the exquisite craft of the author. Show Less
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Ship of Fools, a novel by Katherine Anne Porter, was published in 1962 on April 1 (April Fools' Day). It is the tale of a group of disparate characters, from several different countries and backgrounds, who sail from Mexico to Germany aboard a mixed freighter and passenger ship. In her note
When I began thinking about my novel, I took for my own this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity. It is by no means new -- I am a passenger on that ship. (p. 1)
The ironic epigraph for the first section of the novel, from Baudelaire, is "Quand partons-nous vers le bonheur?". On the very first line of the novel, however, we see a truer sign of what is to come, as the port city of Veracruz is described as "a little purgatory'. Soon the ship that sails becomes just that for the passengers in this complex tale. The ship is populated with a grand complement of passengers (so many that the publisher thoughtfully included a listing of characters preceding the novel proper, xi - xiii). While the majority are Germans there are Americans, Swiss, Spaniards and others, including the masses in steerage.
Porter deftly weaves the stories of each of the several couples and individuals who can each be seen as on a journey into hell as their passions simmer during the voyage. Episodes are encapsulated within the frame of embarkation and disembarkation where characters are presented in their interactions with one another during the voyage, and histories and relationships of several dozen are explored extensively. It takes less than a month in the year of 1931, but the end of the decade and the war it will bring seems to be foreshadowed in some of the tensions that develop during the story.
While leavened with comic moments, it was the presence of love and death and, unfortunately, not a little inhumanity that impressed me the most. The pessimism sometimes seems to be overwhelming and her satire suggests the rise of Nazism and looks metaphorically at the progress of the world on its "voyage to eternity". The sum of the multiplicity of moments and personal details is a tapestry of life that results in a great novel.
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prefacing the novel Porter notes that :When I began thinking about my novel, I took for my own this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity. It is by no means new -- I am a passenger on that ship. (p. 1)
The ironic epigraph for the first section of the novel, from Baudelaire, is "Quand partons-nous vers le bonheur?". On the very first line of the novel, however, we see a truer sign of what is to come, as the port city of Veracruz is described as "a little purgatory'. Soon the ship that sails becomes just that for the passengers in this complex tale. The ship is populated with a grand complement of passengers (so many that the publisher thoughtfully included a listing of characters preceding the novel proper, xi - xiii). While the majority are Germans there are Americans, Swiss, Spaniards and others, including the masses in steerage.
Porter deftly weaves the stories of each of the several couples and individuals who can each be seen as on a journey into hell as their passions simmer during the voyage. Episodes are encapsulated within the frame of embarkation and disembarkation where characters are presented in their interactions with one another during the voyage, and histories and relationships of several dozen are explored extensively. It takes less than a month in the year of 1931, but the end of the decade and the war it will bring seems to be foreshadowed in some of the tensions that develop during the story.
While leavened with comic moments, it was the presence of love and death and, unfortunately, not a little inhumanity that impressed me the most. The pessimism sometimes seems to be overwhelming and her satire suggests the rise of Nazism and looks metaphorically at the progress of the world on its "voyage to eternity". The sum of the multiplicity of moments and personal details is a tapestry of life that results in a great novel.
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LibraryThing member Schmerguls
1120 Ship of Fools, by Katherine Anne Porter (read 17 Jul 1971) I spent over a month reading this, and have been bored thoroughly by it. Why I didn't just quit reading it is beyond me. It is a story of a trip by a German passenger ship from Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany, in 1931. Porter writes
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excellently but what good is style if it says nothing. My time was wasted. Show Less
LibraryThing member Pretensor
Ship of Fools, a bitterly ironic novel, appeared when Porter was 72. Its Oscar winning film version from 1966 was directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Vivien Leigh. The Ship of Fools was set in 1931 aboard a German passenger ship, a kind of a floating purgatory, returning to Germany from Mexico.
Mixed bag of passengers, Germans, Americans, Spaniards, Gypsies, and Mexicans represent a microcosms of peoples, whose life are characterized by jealousy, cruelty, hatred, love, and duplicity. In the first part the reader becomes acquainted with the various characters. The second part contains the torment of the passengers in steerage, their attempts to love and their struggle for detachment. In part three a bacchanalian fiesta brings out all the hidden fears and guilt’s. Porter explores the origin of human evil through the allegorical use of characters, who represent various national and moral types. Captain Thiele is the embodiment of Teutonic authority, one passenger is a Basque, a Christ figure, who plunges into the sea to save an aged bulldog but drowns himself.
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"The ship was none of those specialized carriers of rare goods, much less an elegant pleasure craft coming down from New York, all fresh paint and interior decoration, bringing crowds of prosperous dressed-up tourists with money in their pockets. No, the Vera was a mixed freighter and passenger ship, very steady and broad-bottomed in her style, walloping from one remote port to another, year in year out, honest, reliable and homely as a German housewife." Mixed bag of passengers, Germans, Americans, Spaniards, Gypsies, and Mexicans represent a microcosms of peoples, whose life are characterized by jealousy, cruelty, hatred, love, and duplicity. In the first part the reader becomes acquainted with the various characters. The second part contains the torment of the passengers in steerage, their attempts to love and their struggle for detachment. In part three a bacchanalian fiesta brings out all the hidden fears and guilt’s. Porter explores the origin of human evil through the allegorical use of characters, who represent various national and moral types. Captain Thiele is the embodiment of Teutonic authority, one passenger is a Basque, a Christ figure, who plunges into the sea to save an aged bulldog but drowns himself.
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LibraryThing member dbsovereign
Porter's idea of the ocean of life (instead of Twain's life as a river for example) and how wretchedly petty and selfish we have become - we float along at our own peril...
LibraryThing member romain
Assorted characters meet on a ship sailing from Veracruz to Bremerhaven in 1931, a not uncommon plot device but unique in this instance in that on the ship of fools, there really are only fools. No happy endings here, none of the warm fuzzies of the movie version, just a group of deeply unpleasant
Porter divides her passengers into 3 rough groups: American, Spanish and German. The Americans are by and large the most human of the groups: the lovers Jenny and David lacerating each other with their unreal expectations, the genteel widow Mrs. Treadwell who would be happy ‘if not a soul looked at her for the (entire) voyage’ and the drunken racist, Denny.
The Spanish, represented in the main by a zarzuela dance company being deported from Mexico and medical students traveling from Cuba to France have made an art form of cruelty and are larcenous, jeering and rude. ‘They had a way of sitting together and without warning they would laugh dreadfully, with mirthless faces… always laughing at somebody.’ Included in this troupe are Ric and Rac the 6 year old twins, psychopaths shaped by the cruelty of their parents, evil ‘to the egg of their souls’, who spend their time on board torturing animals and indulging in incestuous sexual play.
The worst of this pack, however, are the Germans, with their surface veneer of respectability barely disguising the fascism and anti-Semitism below the surface. As front men for the cause we have Herr Rieber, a pig faced man with a nose like a snout, and Fr Spockenkieker who embodies ‘to the last trait and feature everything most positively repellant in womankind’. With these two characters Porter is guilty of stereotyping but it is in her other more respectable Germans that we find the roots of the Holocaust: Herr Freytag who is married to a Jew but keeps quiet so as to maintain his seat at the Captain’s table. Fr Rittendorf who believes ‘it is an offense against morality to overlook or condone insolence in an inferior’, the Huttens who live in an ivory tower of intellectual superiority and the ship’s doctor Schumann – perhaps the most decent person on board – who nevertheless chooses the path of least resistance and sidesteps all political confrontation.
Nor does Porter spare the Jews. Lowenthal, her token Jew, is uncharitable to the core and riddled with his own equally ugly prejudices; definitely not the ‘hero of a Cause’ but rather the sort of Jew other Jews don’t like. Freytag’s in-laws in Germany are not much better, attacking ‘him from all sides at once, some of them with open contempt, or a genuine personal dislike’ because he has made a mixed marriage.
Racism aside, Porter also gives us a healthy dose of 1930’s sexism. David is in the process of destroying Jenny’s self-confidence right down to the colors of her clothes and her style of painting, and the dance troupe is merely a front for a thriving ring of prostitution. But it is left to the Germans to give us a real taste of the pre-war marriage ethic. Women are ‘children of a larger growth’. ‘All associations between women, even of the most casual and passing kind were unnatural, morbid by nature, hotbeds of complicity against men, leading to divisions between husband and wife… A woman’s loyalty must not, cannot ever be (therefore) to her own sex, but to her men… above all, and before all, to her husband.’ The German females on board accept this as an article of faith, as do the Spanish dancers, handing over their hard earned money without question to their pimps. In fact the only woman who puts up any show of emancipation is the American girl, Jenny, and being a passenger on the ship of fools, even she makes a very poor showing of it.
Porter’s central theme therefore is man’s inhumanity to man and each group expresses this either through the personal or the political. Her prose style is excellent – she is a Pulitzer Prize winner – and yet one moves from page to page with all the squirming pleasure of an evening’s viewing of ‘Melrose Place’ or ‘Dynasty’.
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people one would hope never to meet individually, let alone collectively.Porter divides her passengers into 3 rough groups: American, Spanish and German. The Americans are by and large the most human of the groups: the lovers Jenny and David lacerating each other with their unreal expectations, the genteel widow Mrs. Treadwell who would be happy ‘if not a soul looked at her for the (entire) voyage’ and the drunken racist, Denny.
The Spanish, represented in the main by a zarzuela dance company being deported from Mexico and medical students traveling from Cuba to France have made an art form of cruelty and are larcenous, jeering and rude. ‘They had a way of sitting together and without warning they would laugh dreadfully, with mirthless faces… always laughing at somebody.’ Included in this troupe are Ric and Rac the 6 year old twins, psychopaths shaped by the cruelty of their parents, evil ‘to the egg of their souls’, who spend their time on board torturing animals and indulging in incestuous sexual play.
The worst of this pack, however, are the Germans, with their surface veneer of respectability barely disguising the fascism and anti-Semitism below the surface. As front men for the cause we have Herr Rieber, a pig faced man with a nose like a snout, and Fr Spockenkieker who embodies ‘to the last trait and feature everything most positively repellant in womankind’. With these two characters Porter is guilty of stereotyping but it is in her other more respectable Germans that we find the roots of the Holocaust: Herr Freytag who is married to a Jew but keeps quiet so as to maintain his seat at the Captain’s table. Fr Rittendorf who believes ‘it is an offense against morality to overlook or condone insolence in an inferior’, the Huttens who live in an ivory tower of intellectual superiority and the ship’s doctor Schumann – perhaps the most decent person on board – who nevertheless chooses the path of least resistance and sidesteps all political confrontation.
Nor does Porter spare the Jews. Lowenthal, her token Jew, is uncharitable to the core and riddled with his own equally ugly prejudices; definitely not the ‘hero of a Cause’ but rather the sort of Jew other Jews don’t like. Freytag’s in-laws in Germany are not much better, attacking ‘him from all sides at once, some of them with open contempt, or a genuine personal dislike’ because he has made a mixed marriage.
Racism aside, Porter also gives us a healthy dose of 1930’s sexism. David is in the process of destroying Jenny’s self-confidence right down to the colors of her clothes and her style of painting, and the dance troupe is merely a front for a thriving ring of prostitution. But it is left to the Germans to give us a real taste of the pre-war marriage ethic. Women are ‘children of a larger growth’. ‘All associations between women, even of the most casual and passing kind were unnatural, morbid by nature, hotbeds of complicity against men, leading to divisions between husband and wife… A woman’s loyalty must not, cannot ever be (therefore) to her own sex, but to her men… above all, and before all, to her husband.’ The German females on board accept this as an article of faith, as do the Spanish dancers, handing over their hard earned money without question to their pimps. In fact the only woman who puts up any show of emancipation is the American girl, Jenny, and being a passenger on the ship of fools, even she makes a very poor showing of it.
Porter’s central theme therefore is man’s inhumanity to man and each group expresses this either through the personal or the political. Her prose style is excellent – she is a Pulitzer Prize winner – and yet one moves from page to page with all the squirming pleasure of an evening’s viewing of ‘Melrose Place’ or ‘Dynasty’.
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LibraryThing member figre
A bunch of horrible people take a transatlantic voyage from Mexico to Germany, treat each other horribly, and end the voyage nearly as horrible as when they first arrived.
Okay, if you haven’t figured it out from my synopsis, I did not like this book. I suppose I understand why it is so revered.
Perhaps the most interesting portions of the book are those that speak of the rampant racism that was occurring in the times this book was set – 1931, between the wars. And, it being a German ship, you can imagine just how much hatred is spewed for anyone who falls outside the racially accepted norms. This reflects a little too painfully on the times we face today.
But, even those insights were no match for how much I detested being a part of these people’s lives.
(Mind you, that isn’t going to stop me from now watching the movie. It will be interesting to see how it all gets translated.)
Okay, if you haven’t figured it out from my synopsis, I did not like this book. I suppose I understand why it is so revered.
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The details and the characterizations are excellent. There is a build to what I saw as the climax (the night of the big party) that is slow, deliberate, inevitable, and revealing. But I cannot care about any…any of these people. They are pathetic, mean, spiteful…they are not characters I care enough about to want to invest my time. (And I did invest my time; trust me.) Occasionally, I would start to become interested in a story thread, and then realize that interest was of the “train wreck” variety. And, upon the realization, I would again recognize that I just didn’t care.Perhaps the most interesting portions of the book are those that speak of the rampant racism that was occurring in the times this book was set – 1931, between the wars. And, it being a German ship, you can imagine just how much hatred is spewed for anyone who falls outside the racially accepted norms. This reflects a little too painfully on the times we face today.
But, even those insights were no match for how much I detested being a part of these people’s lives.
(Mind you, that isn’t going to stop me from now watching the movie. It will be interesting to see how it all gets translated.)
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LibraryThing member steller0707
The German ship, called the Vera, is making a trip from Veracruz, Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany, carrying first class passengers of various citizenship and an "underclass" of prisoners, revolutionaries and the poor. Katherine Anne Porter modeled the novel after her observations on an ocean trip
The cast of characters is somewhat large, and although there was a list at the front of the book, I found making my own list with a few more notes on each helped to keep them straight at first. But Porter's prose is so vivid it gives life to each one and soon the list was not necessary. I felt like I knew them.
But it's not warm, fuzzy feelings, though. Ethnic prejudices and class snobbery are all too evident throughout the novel: the condescension of first class toward the steerage travelers, the nationalism of the German travelers, and the public ostracizing of the Jews. Young readers may wonder, knowing the horrors of World War II to come, how such blatant talk could have been so common. In this regard, the "Ship of Fools" might be read as a cautionary tale.
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she took in 1931. The cast of characters is somewhat large, and although there was a list at the front of the book, I found making my own list with a few more notes on each helped to keep them straight at first. But Porter's prose is so vivid it gives life to each one and soon the list was not necessary. I felt like I knew them.
But it's not warm, fuzzy feelings, though. Ethnic prejudices and class snobbery are all too evident throughout the novel: the condescension of first class toward the steerage travelers, the nationalism of the German travelers, and the public ostracizing of the Jews. Young readers may wonder, knowing the horrors of World War II to come, how such blatant talk could have been so common. In this regard, the "Ship of Fools" might be read as a cautionary tale.
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LibraryThing member untraveller
This book was loaded with narrow-minded fools. It took two world wars and still the hate and prejudice following the second of those conflicts was rampant enough to create battle zones around the world in its aftermath (Korea, VietNam, etc.). The writing reminded me of a German novelist such as
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Thomas Mann, but a bit more lucid. Finished 09.06.2020 at the NR. Show Less
LibraryThing member burritapal
A German ship, loaded with deported sugar cane workers from Cuba, a supposedly anarchist Condesa from Cuba, medical students from the closed university in Havana, a Troup of zarzuela dancers doubling as pimps and sex workers, and various travelers from Mexico leaves Veracruz for Bremerhaven in
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1931. Everybody hates Jews and, for the most part, each other. They're at each other's throats night and day, and it's most delicious to read. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — Fiction — 1963)
Notable Books List (1962)
Physical description
497 p.; 22 cm
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