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    Short Black 8 Prosper: A Voyage at Sea
    Short Black 8 Prosper: A Voyage at Sea
    Short Black 8 Prosper: A Voyage at Sea
    Ebook52 pages29 minutes

    Short Black 8 Prosper: A Voyage at Sea

    By Simon Leys

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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.

    Short Blacks are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

    Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and the Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People’s Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateSep 23, 2015
    ISBN9781925203547
    Short Black 8 Prosper: A Voyage at Sea
    Author

    Simon Leys

    Simon Leys’ many books include The Hall of Uselessness, Chinese Shadows, The Death of Napoleon and Other People’s Thoughts. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Le Monde and Le Figaro Littéraire.

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      Book preview

      Short Black 8 Prosper - Simon Leys

      SHORT BLACKS are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.

      SHORT BLACKS

      1 Richard Flanagan The Australian Disease:

      On the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom

      2 Karen Hitchcock Fat City

      3 Noel Pearson The War of the Worlds

      4 Helen Garner Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

      5 John Birmingham

      The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999

      6 Anna Krien Booze Territory

      7 David Malouf The One Day

      8 Simon Leys Prosper: A voyage at sea

      9 Robert Manne

      Julian Assange: The cypherpunk revolutionary

      10 Les Murray Killing the Black Dog

      11 Robyn Davidson No Fixed Address

      12 Galarrwuy Yunupingu

      Tradition, Truth and Tomorrow

      Published by Black Inc.,

      an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

      37–39 Langridge Street

      Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

      enquiries@blackincbooks.com

      www.blackincbooks.com

      Copyright © Simon Leys 2005

      Simon Leys asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

      First published in The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper, Black Inc., 2005.

      This edition published 2015.

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Leys, Simon, 1935–2014, author.

      Prosper : a voyage at sea / Simon Leys.

      9781863957700 (paperback) 9781925203547 (ebook)

      Short blacks; no.8.

      Prosper (Fishing boat) Seamanship.

      623.88

      Cover and text design by Peter Long.

      SIMON LEYS’ many books include The Hall of Uselessness, Chinese Shadows, The Death of Napoleon and Other People’s Thoughts. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Le Monde and Le Figaro Littéraire.

      When I was a student, during my last summer in Europe before I left for the Far East, I had an opportunity to join the crew of a tuna-fishing boat from Brittany – one of the last boats working under sail.

      Sorting out some papers recently, I came across the notes I had taken then – some forty-five years ago – about this experience of my youth.

      The following narrative is based on these notes, but I have not modified their contents, for these memories are dear to me and they evoke a world that no longer exists.

      By train to Auray. It seems that true Brittany starts only now, as I leave the railway station and take the bus to Etel.

      It is Assumption Day. The Breton women went to Mass this morning and will go back to church for Vespers in the afternoon, while their men spend the day in the cafés. The bus is full of women in long black skirts and white lace head-dresses. There are a few sailors wearing their Sunday best; a priest, built like a woodcutter, is reading his breviary. The bus has to stop on the way to allow a drunken sailor to piss on the side of the road. The women crack a few jokes – spiced with

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