The classic bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize winner dramatizes the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s in a sweeping story of a transatlantic cruise featuring a cast of unforgettable characters,
The story takes place in the summer of 1931, on board a cruise ship bound for Germany. Passengers include a Spanish noblewoman, a drunken German lawyer, an American divorcee, a pair of Mexican Catholic priests. This ship of fools is a crucible of intense experience, out of which everyone emerges forever changed. Rich in incident, passion, and treachery, the novel explores themes of nationalism, cultural and ethnic pride, and basic human frailty that are as relevant today as they were when the book was first published in 1962.
The title of this book is a translation from the German of Das Narrenschiff, a moral allegory by Sebastian Brant. The author read it in Basel in the summer of 1932 when she had still vividly in mind the impressions of her fist voyage to Europe. She took for her own this simple almost universal image of the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity.
