"The Last of the Flatboats" - это книга, которую написал George Cary Eggleston и она была впервые опубликована в 1900 году. Это исторический роман, который рассказывает о жизни и приключениях главного героя, молодого парня по имени Lancey, который живет на берегу реки Огайо в начале 19-го века.
Основной сюжет книги связан с последним путешествием плоскодонки - типа судна, которое использовалось в период колонизации Америки для перевозки грузов по рекам. Lancey и его друзья отправляются в путешествие на плоскодонке, чтобы доставить груз до города Новый Орлеан. В ходе путешествия они сталкиваются с различными препятствиями и опасностями, такими как бандиты, непогода и проблемы с техникой.
Кроме того, в книге описывается жизнь и обычаи людей, которые жили вдоль реки Огайо и Миссисипи в то время. Она представляет собой не только захватывающее путешествие по реке, но и исторический рассказ об этом периоде Американской истории, который будет интересен для любителей приключенческих романов и истории.
Автор произведений на морскую тематику, Eggleston в своей новой книге описывает приключения отважного героя Maston, исколесившего множество неведомых земель и водных просторов на борту легендарного "Плоского судна".
Eggleston's "The Last of the Flatties" is not really a novel in the usual sense of the term at all. It is more of an extended story collection of 21 stories dealing with various diverging lives that interweave as they accompany one another or cross paths.\nThe primary theme is a Beadle from Cumberland named Harry Vardaman who is on the way to receive a parcel from his stepson, Jimmie Bridges, in New Orleans.\nAlong the way, Harry meets Becky Cleek, the canvas artist who had been [[Eudora Welty]]\'s model for her painting "O Pioneers!"), Rivedal, the shy country girl in love with Stan Watters (such a long, difficult name), and Cutler Withers; a con artist who borrows from certain individuals and gives donkeys as an excuse to borrow more (the titular "last of the flatties."), Vertner Brooks, a new farmer in Centerville, MO; a womanizing parole patrolman named Kyle Lamberson, Charles Goffe, and a couple others.\nThere are plotlines, although they plant themselves wide apart across Harry\'s trek and, of course, layering them is that Harry is accompanied by the wise and truly unique grandmother Margaret "Prudy" Vardaman peeling poems from her hair and heeding the advice she spits out.\nEggleston introduces the famous Gullah Geechee vampire Brock, this time portrayed as truly sympathetic and essentially harmless – and not all that long ago either – and also draws upon other Louisiana legends, such as voodoo, spiritualist inquisitor Daniel Webster [taken out of context] and various sections and bawdy cartoon materials.\nThese recasting roles render a distinct texture to the manner in which the reader will skim each "type of story", a consistent feature of Eggleston\'s style that persists to the end of his career with such ilk as \'zombie country\'.\nSome of these Eggleston \'stories\' (in quotes because they\'re not quite stories anymore) very much spoke of this author\'s peculiar dependence upon and affection for those aspects of old Geechee life portrayed in those myths and stories, where "dead souls and revenants acquired mystically human powers" grafting these folk onto larger, fictional public sentimentalisms.\nA novel that surely isn\'t a novel at piece, "The Last FlatBoat" emerges as a sagacious collection of humanity\'s agonized troubles, trapping the reader into an entire brown study centerless within the murky pool of Horry\'s metaphors.
#зарубежная классика
