false 2104716 0882080334 9780882080338 38 10 Death Ship http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2104716.Death_Ship 32530 B. Traven 478 74 5 1 false Fri Nov 09 22:57:03 -0800 2007 Fri Nov 09 23:17:55 -0800 2007 The first part is an occassionally amusing odyssey of a man without a passport dealing with authorities, but mostly its just an painful journey of the absurd into the depths of bureaucratic and legal inanity.
The second part of the book is where it gets really gruesome. Mr No-passport gets a job working in the bowels of the Death Ship (Life) and so begins a couple of hundred pages of graphic musing on work, slavery, purgatory, hell, the eternal darkness of the soul, all that.
There is no saving grace in this book. No rebellion, no uplifting moments, no salvation. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, only misery.
Why read it? To get an idea of how low it can really go? To begin to get a notion of the torment possible in this world? I don't know. This book has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, its a journey to the end of the night that plunges into eternal night, but...I have no doubt that this reflects a lot of peoples' lives.

PS Existential despair before existentialism.
]]>