Prosper: A Voyage at Sea; Short Black 8
Sep 2015 · Black Inc.
Ebook
94
Pages
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About this ebook
'A big liner, brightly lit, passes us one or two cable-lengths ahead. "Ow! They are guzzling champagne but cannot see what's in front of them!" grumbles Etienne, who has the helm and puts Prosper back on course. Our wooden boat, which one long wave can carry, is a mere cork in the wake of that ship, which crushes three dozen such waves under her uncaring steel plates. How many hundreds of men does she carry? Up there, people laugh, play, dream, eat and sleep ... while we, a few feet above the water, surrounded by dancing lights, keep watch till dawn.'
One summer, Simon Leys joined the crew of a tuna-fishing boat in Brittany, one of the last boats working under sail. In this exceptionally beautiful and elegiac essay, he evokes the traditions, hardships and dangers of the oldest and finest form of seamanship.
About the author
Pierre Ryckmans was born on September 28, 1935 in Brussels, Belgian. He studied law and art history at the Catholic University of Louvain. At the age of 19, he was one of a delegation of young Belgians invited to China on a trip that included a meeting with Zhou Enlai, the premier under Mao. He spent 12 years in the Far East, where he became an expert on Chinese painting, calligraphy and poetry. In Hong Kong, he monitored the Chinese press on behalf of Belgian diplomats. He taught at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1970. He primarily wrote under the pen name Simon Leys. He criticized Mao's cultural revolution in his first two books, Les Habits Neufs du Président Mao (The Chairman's New Clothes) and Ombres Chinoises (Chinese Shadows). His other works included The Death of Napoleon and The Wreck of the Batavia. He died of cancer on August 11, 2014 at the age of 78.
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