Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter

I really can't remember whether I read this book when it first came out some 40-odd years ago, but I had been thinking about reading it when it showed up in a small bookstore in Apalachicola, Florida.  I just felt it was waiting for me to buy it, and read it.

I found the first 100 pages or so quite interesting, but then it became a chore, perhaps because it was such a static sort of setting, many of the characters were indistinguishable from one another in name, circumstance, bias, whatever, and I began to see everything in a sort of grey/black/white: no colour, no accent to the situations. Even the zarzuela dancers seemed colourless, although they were actually quite dramatic characters in the story.

I understood that this was a voyage of life itself, and that the various characters represented all that is both good and bad in all of us, but I just couldn't eat it up like I expected I would. I began skimming, and once I even put it aside, but somehow I picked it up again and started where I'd left off.  This happened yet again near the end, when by this time I really didn't care what happened to these people.

Maybe it would have made a better play- I'll try to see the movie and decide again. In summing everything up, I  am glad I perservered through to the end, but I won't miss it!