Word: vera
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Ship of Fools, by Katherine Anne Porter. The ship is a German passenger-freighter that steams from Vera Cruz to Bremerhaven in 1931. The allegory is that this and all passages of the world's voyage are dismal; the art is consummate...
...year is 1931. A German passenger-freighter, the Vera (the name cruelly suggests "truth") sails from Vera Cruz, bound for Bremerhaven. It is. of course, a floating metaphor, no less effective because it is obvious: the "ship of the world, bound for eternity," as the author explains at the outset...
...foulness was the rise of pride-injured German nationalism, and the fools were the onlookers to whom it seemed merely an unimportant local nastiness. This is the specific burden of Novelist Porter's Ship, and the author directs the passengers of the Vera brilliantly as they play out their assigned charades...
What is demonstrated in fascinating incident and mordant detail as the Vera rolls to Bremerhaven is that they are pitifully identical: they are human, and thus, the author translates, they are pathetic, contemptible fools...
...married, runs away and becomes a famous fashion designer. When the handsome devil finds her again, he is revealed as anything but a gay seducer; he is in fact the all-American archetype of the mother's boyish male, a muddle husband with an alcoholic, homicidal wife (Vera Miles). Adultery thus spectacularly excused, massed violins take over and sweep the lovers away to a villa drowsing in jasmine by the passion-tossed Tyrrhenian, to a rose-covered cottage in the meadowy environs of Paris. "Just be with me whenever you can," she croons, as the finches twitter...