Fionnuala's Reviews > S. S. Proleterka

If it hadn't been for the goodreads community, SS Proleterka might never have appeared on my horizon. I don't think I've ever spotted Fleur Jaeggy's books in a book shop or heard about her elsewhere. But I have read several Jaeggy reviews on this website over the years, and was impressed each time. After reading one such review, I placed SS Proleterka in a shopping trolley. After reading another, I finally pressed 'purchase'.

And so the book arrived at my door in a cardboard package that seemed mysteriously flat as if it were empty or contained little more than a few sheets of fine paper. Yes, this is a very slim book, and if the text were printed in the tiniest of fonts with the tiniest of line spacings and margins, it might indeed fit on a few sheets of paper. But instead it is printed in a large font with generous line spacing and margins. I'm glad about that on this dark January evening when I've finally opened it.

I didn't start reading the book the day it arrived in the post—books have to wait their turn at my house. They have to pass a considerable time on a book pile before they can enter the present tense of this reader's life. Some books wait for a very long time, others are never read at all because their moment somehow never arrives. SS Proleterka is remarkably lucky—scarcely two months on the book pile. And garnering the position of first book chosen in 2020 as well. 'Now' is truly SS Proleterka's moment.

The present tense suits this book. I notice early on that the narrator uses the present tense even when roaming in her thoughts over moments in her earlier life and in her father's and grandparents' lives. Occasionally, she switches to the past tense, I did not know my father well or In a short time they lost everything but I hardly noticed those shifts in tense, so skillfully are they inserted. The narrative sometimes moves between first and third person point of view too, but again, it's seamlessly done, and we soon realise that there's only one narrator although she may sometimes speak of herself in the third person.

We do not know the narrator's name, and, by the end of the book, we really know little else about her either, where she lives or what she has done with her life, for instance. What we do know is that during her childhood, she lived with her maternal grandmother and spent brief holidays with her divorced father. The last of those holidays, a trip on a Mediterranean cruise ship when she was fifteen, becomes the anchor of the narrative. From the present moment of that journey, vague memories of the past emerge, and they help her, and us, decipher the father figure though he will remain shadowy til the end, like the name of the ship, 'SS Proleterka', no longer decipherable once the passengers disembark at the end of the cruise. Dissolution.

As the pages advance, the narrator tries less and less to decipher the father. She is content to observe him. And the reader learns to imitate her, content to observe the narrative, no longer seeking desperately to understand it as in the early pages. Our experience with the narrative mirrors hers with her father.

Mirrors feature in the story frequently, mirrors that reflect people's faces, their rooms, their gardens. But there's also a mirror in the unfolding of the story in so far as it can be said to unfold. While the cruise ship episode anchors the book and gives it its title, there's a second present moment in the narrative. It takes place thirty-five years after the fifteen year-old's trip on the cruise ship, and although there is no ship involved this time, it is nevertheless a reflection of the earlier episode, being another encounter between a father and a daughter. And once again, the daughter doesn't seek to know the father. She's content to observe. We observe too, and we don't draw conclusions.

But if I were to draw any conclusions about Jaeggy's book, it would be this one: when the writing style matches the content as perfectly as it does here, each page becomes a reader's ideal playground. We want to absorb every single word in a fierce rush, but we want to pause often too: to admire, to enjoy, to reflect. And when the book ends, we don't close it. No. Like a child on a merry-go-round, we climb on again and relive the moment all over.

The last time I had this experience was while reading an equally slim and sparely written book where the style and the content were also a perfect match: Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo. Rulfo's and Jaeggy's are books to observe and admire, the way we approach paintings or haikus. We may never figure out why they move us, but they do. Like arrows, they can seem hard and sharp at times, but they shoot straight and true.
And like life, they pass through agony and ecstasy on the way.