Swan Song - An Odyssey

Informationen zum Autor LISA ALTHER was born and grew up in Tennessee. She has written eight novels, among them Kinflicks , a feminist coming-of-age chronicle. Her other books include Original Sins, Other Women, Bedrock, and a book of conversations between Alther and the painter Françoise Gilot ( About Women ). Alther's books have been published in seventeen languages and have appeared on best-seller lists worldwide. She lives in Vermont and Tennessee. Klappentext A new novel, funny, wise, moving, true, as only Lisa Alther can write ("she had me laughing at 4 in the morning" --Doris Lessing), set on a cruise ship, about a woman, a doctor in charge of the ship's clinic, recovering from the loss of her longtime female lover, a much-admired writer, and coping with the high-wire madcappery of cruise ship life as she reckons with her past and feels her way into the future. Dr. Jessie Drake, in her mid-sixties, following the sudden deaths of her parents and Kat, her partner of twenty years, has fled the Vermont life she has known for decades. In an effort to escape the oppressive constancy of grief, she accepts a job from an old flame from her residency in New York City's Roosevelt Hospital, and agrees to assist Ben as the ship's doctor on a British liner. Jessie boards in Hong Kong, and, as the Amphitrite sails throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, cruise ship antics ensue. Jessie is lulled back into a long-ago romance with the ship's co-doctor, and both she and her new/old beau become enmeshed with the ship's lead (female) singer/entertainer. Among the passengers who fling socialized behavior aside on the high seas: a former Florida beauty queen (Miss Florida Power and Light) on a second honeymoon with her husband, as she causes high-velocity scandal, while juggling onboard affairs with a suicidal golf pro, and a defrocked priest hired as one of the liner's gentleman hosts, until she vanishes--poof!--from the ship off the coast of Portugal . . . As the ship sails through the Gulf of Aden and into a possible hijacking by Somali pirates, Jessie retreats into her lover's journals, written during her final months, journals filled with sketches of potential characters, observations on life and love--as well as drafts of a long new poem in progress, "Swan Song," that seems to be about being in love with someone else, someone new. As Jessie's grief turns to suspicion about the woman she thought she knew so well, her illumination of the poem's meaning begins to lift the constraints of the past and make clear the way toward the future. Leseprobe Chapter 3   Reverse Cowgirl   “This is your captain speaking. It’s a lovely afternoon here on the Arabian Sea. The waters are calm, with just the slightest swell, and a gentle breeze from the northwest is keeping the temperature balmy on deck. I think you would be hard-pressed not to agree with me that it’s a glorious season to be seaborne—and a marvelous day simply to be alive!”   As she ate spinach ravioli in the officers’ dining room, Jessie smiled at Captain Kilgore’s British accent, combined with his un-British rhapsodies about the weather. His daily noontime commentaries usually sounded like bad bucolic poetry. At age forty-six, he had recently married for the first time—a younger French woman who sold Hermès scarves in a boutique on board. She was always decked out in her wares, and she ran workshops to teach women passengers four dozen ways to tie their scarves, like sailors learning their knots. The captain appeared here and there around the ship all day long, sporting a goofy grin. He was so besotted with his new wife that it was a wonder he could steer the ship in a straight line.   Loud laughter erupted from a table in the corner, at which huddled four bridge officers in white uniforms and a young East Indian woman who worked behind the purser’s desk. Clearly the men were vying ...

Product details

• Authors: Lisa Alther
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.06.2020
• EAN: 9780525657545
• ISBN: 978-0-525-65754-5
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 143 mm x 210 mm x 17 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature