Here is a masterpiece, from start to finish. Moby Dick without the whining. Bukowski, had Bukowski been able to get out of his own arse. Traven's English is even more roughly chopped than Beckett's French.

Traven writes class literature. Working class literature. Some critics categorize novels based on the arch drawn by their heros, from dire to glory, from glory to misery. Traven takes his characters at their lowest and brings them down. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre starts with Dobbs scrapping for twenty-five centavos to see him through the day and takes him to the ultimate destitution. The Death Ship's narrator bargains his opening scene through ten dollars. When all ends he has lost everything: his job, his country, his name. He does not even have a pocket to hold the compass he managed to rescue. Holding dearly to a piece of wood he glares, astounded, at where the sea just swallowed his comrade Stanislav. Does he cry? Does he despair? None of that with Traven, "no sir". Pippip is no Job, no Ishmael. For in death he sees hope. Stanislav was at sea when, in 1919, Danzig went from Germany to Poland. Stanislav was born in Danzig. He is now neither German nor Polish - to both countries Stanislav is not alive, for "how can we be sure that you were really born if we cannot see your birth certificate?" Nonetheless, death opened to him its big liquid arms and swallowed him without further question. "The Great Skipper had taken him without papers."

Forget Melville. Forget Bukowski. Forget Beckett. Traven lines up with Kafka. But where Kafka has the comical voice of an office clerk fleeing his boredom in the fantasy world of his imagination, Traven has the raucous, mocking inflections of a runaway. Traven is Kafka in real life. He is the dire bottom, the unbreakable rock against which all literature ends up banging, no matter what it is trying to say. He is class literature at its utmost universal.

Set in arguably the most interesting period of human history, the inter-war period, this is a scathing indictment of bureaucracy, borders, nationalism, capitalism, Bolshevism, wage-labour and even some home truths about the working-class in the aftermath of World War 1.

Really grim in parts but it's very funny.

B. Traven himself is so interesting. An anarchist involved in the German revolution who had to flee Germany as he was charged with high treason and eventually became lost and then found again, living Mexico to write about the Mexican revolution. A wonderful, if difficult life.

A fantastic piece of anarchist literature, I hope I can find more like this.

I have to add to all the reviews that this is a miserably brilliant book that there are some funny parts in it - like the Konigsberger Klopse joke.

To say I didn't like it would be an understatement. Of all the books we've read for book club, The Death Ship is the standard for hated books.

I guess I'm not the type to read about ships and sailors. I'm not sure what is happening, I managed to read the first 70 pages, and there still was no sight of a ship. Maybe some other time.