Racundra's Third Cruise

click here for more details, find new or used items	Arthur Ransome Our price £10.47 (£14.95) New from £8.00 Used from £5.97 Pages: 128 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1898660891 Pub: John Wiley & Sons Pub date: 2002-03-31 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 22971

Reader Reviews:

Previously-undiscovered vintage Ransome - a real treat (52/52 people found this helpful)

This book is an unexpected bonus for Ransome fans, who thought they’d already seen all he wrote, and I don’t expect they will be disappointed with it.
It is an account of a voyage up a river in Latvia in the 1920s, planned as a sequel to “Racundra’s First Cruise”, but never completed. Racundra was the boat Ransome had built for himself and his eventual wife in Riga, soon after the First World War. Thr first cruise was full of incident and excitement and made his name as a yachting writer, after he’d established a reputation as a political journalist covering the Russian Revolution, and before he went on to write the Swallows and Amazons books.
This voyage is an altogether more placid affair, with a focus on the minutiae of life afloat. Ransome, sometimes with his wife - “the cook” - fishes, shops, has trouble with the anchor and the engine (“the little donkey” with which his relationship gradually warms as the narrative progresses), meets and talks with the locals, and observes the war-ravaged scenery.
He observes and comments with a perceptive, journalist’s eye, and his literary style, fluent, elegantly-constructed and unfussy is as relaxed and easy on the ear as the river itself.
The presentation of the book draws on three sources: the finished draft, as far as it goes, the boat’s log, and Ransome’s own notebook, with all three entries presented for each day’s voyage, so that we can compare them. The photographs, which are plentiful, are Ransome’s own, discovered by the present volume’s editor Brian Hammett, in the Ransome archives at Leeds University.
It’s not a book to be hurried - I’ve been dipping into it for almost a month now, and making it last. Some of the incidents and images have an almost poetic intensity that causes them to linger in the mind. Even though Ransome never got round to publishing it, much of the writing in Racundra’s Third Cruise is equal to his best elsewhere.

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