false 2782549 5 4 The Ship http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1215358314m/2782549.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2782549.The_Ship 714590 Hans Henny Jahnn 15 5 5 0 false Wed Nov 04 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Nov 06 06:43:24 -0800 2009 Fri Nov 06 06:52:50 -0800 2009 http://murdermystery.livejournal.com/443...

I am always hesitant, to be completely honest, when it comes to books that were written basically before 1950. I generally do not mesh well with the prose of anything but the contemporary. However, upon encountering Jahnn at the blog A Journey Round My Skull: a gay german expressionist who repaired organs and wrote one of the most devastating books of all time? I knew I had to give him a shot. I requested the book through inter-library loan and about a week later the book arrived.

The prose style itself, or perhaps the translation, is beautiful. Jahnn has a fragmented style that perfectly decorates the emotional spheres of isolation that he creates with his text. Adjectives, verbs, nouns punctuate his sentences in the way periods and em dashes should.

The words, so meandering, remove you, occasionally, from any events that are guiding the narrative. There is an entire chapter that disoriented me so much that I couldn't even tell you what happened in it, other than stories were told and an idea was set forth.

I also must admit that upon finishing the novel I found myself considering a kinship between Jahnn and Philippe Grandrieux. If 95% of the dialogue were scrapped, and the inner-monologues that populate the book were turned into color-field blurred screens of absolute terror, the book would be a prime contender for adaptation by Grandrieux.

I have a slight, if not subconscious, obsession with ships and the events that occur on them, and this novel violates the ship in a way I've never encountered anywhere else. There are mysteries that are never solved, secrets that exist for no purpose other than to pile dread upon dread and create the intensity of nihilistic terror.

As has been said elsewhere, the book is boring in parts, but that only serves to heighten the intensity of the rest of the book. This is fantastic.]]>