Ship of fools / by Katherine Anne Porter.

"A Signet book."

Embarkation : Quand partons-nous vers le bonheur? (Baudelaire) -- High Sea : Kein Haus, Keine Heimat ... (song by Brahms) -- Harbors : For here have we no continuing city ... (Saint Paul).

The classic bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize winner dramatizes the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s in a sweeping story of a transatlantic cruise featuring a cast of unforgettable characters.-- Publisher description

The 48 first-class passengers and the 900 Spaniards in steerage on a passenger-freighter crossing from Mexico to Germany in 1931 are traveling on a voyage of life. The theme of the novel is the passengers' unavailing withdrawal from a life of disappointment, seeking a kind of utopia, and, "without knowing what to do next", setting out for a long voyage to pre-World War II Europe, a world of prejudice, racism and evil. Mrs. Treadwell, a nostalgic American divorcée, hopes to find happiness in Paris, where she once spent her youth. Elsa Lutz, the plain daughter of a Swiss hotelkeeper, thinks heaven might be in the Isle of Wight. Jenny, an artist, says the most dangerous and happiest moment in her life was when she was swimming alone in the Gulf of Mexico, confronted with a school of dolphins. And at the end of the novel, one of the ship's musicians, a gangly starving boy, feels overjoyed to finally be off the ship and back in his home country, as if Germany were a "human being, a good and dear trusted friend who had come a long way to welcome him". Thus Porter manages to convey that salvation is reality, and evil can be overcome.

Originally published: New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1962.