Word: wenzel
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Dates: during 1951-1951
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Actually, The World's Last Corner is a picaresque novel with the juice squeezed out. The traditional picaresque offers a rogue-hero merrily breaking social conventions to rise from squalor to respectability; Plieviers hero, Wenzel, is more victim than rogue - a seafaring, 20th Century Everyman who breaks the laws of society only because he wants...
...When Wenzel jumps ship at the South American port of Caleta Colosal, he feels he has reached the world's dead end. It suits him well enough; through hard work and corner-cutting, he is soon the owner of a small fishery. But his business and his hopes go smash when he runs head-on into the big Nitra mining company, which bosses the country. Wenzel has to leave Caleta Colosal because he has persuaded the Nitra workers to strike for 10 pesos more a day. But, like Hemingway's hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls...
Part Two of Plievier's story picks up Wenzel, again flat broke, in another South American port. He wanders into the waterfront dive run by Milly, a "shark" who helps shanghai drunken sailors into freighter crews. Wenzel's young face and smooth muscles soften Milly's heart; as she liquors up a crew for a wretched guano ship, she decides to save him for herself. But Wenzel refuses the favor and takes his place with his tricked and sodden buddies...
...with dynamite, a Sunday dinner at the Caleta Colosal Hotel, the all-night "party" from which Milly gets her crew. As a story of sailors on the beach, the book is entirely convincing, but as the social parable for which Plievier was aiming it does not come off. Hero Wenzel is simply too dull for the conclusions Plievier puts in his mouth...