A fifteen-year-old girl and her father, Johannes, take a cruise to Greece on the SS 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.'
