I am still in Oakland with the kitten. Offshore is not one of the books I brought with me to read. On Wednesday I went into San Francisco to meet a friend and I stopped by a thrift store in the Mission where I’ve always had good luck finding books. (I remember specifically that it’s where I bought Kinshu: Autumn Brocade several years ago, a book I’d never heard of but ended up loving. I got it on the visit here where I decided to undertake my world books reading project, and it was the first Japanese novel I read.) The shop had three Penelope Fitzgerald books, none of which I’d heard of, and I considered grabbing all of them (they were slim and wouldn’t add much weight, I reasoned), but I decided to get just one and narrowed it down to Offshore because — as is stated on the cover — it was the winner of the Booker Prize.
Offshore is set in a small community of barge-dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s. Each one is an outsider in their own way — a woman living apart from her husband with her two daughters who’ve stopped going to school; an elderly maritime painter whose own barge is beyond repair; a male prostitute who always has a sympathetic ear; a former Naval officer from the war who doesn’t want to give up ship life though his wife does; a muddy cat who’s chased by the rats. the book is small, but beautifully shows how this odd little community comes together, and falls apart — along with their boats.
