Typographer and book designer Judith Schalansky grew up behind the Iron Curtain in 1980’s East Germany. Unable to travel beyond the borders of her own insular country, she spent her childhood poring over maps of unobtainably far off places,
“travelling through the atlas by finger . . . conquering distant worlds in my parents’ sitting room.”
Schalansky’s book An Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will was released to great acclaim in the autumn (winning ‘Germany’s Most Beautiful Book’ prize on its release – and you can see why, it’s a gorgeous thing). The book contains short stories, some factual, some more fanciful, laid out with oddly haunting line drawings of the islands themselves on each opposite page, inviting you to cast yourself into that faraway place with your imagination. It makes for perfect bedtime reading. Schalansky writes in her introduction:
‘The absurdity of reality is lost on the large land masses, but on islands, it is writ large. An island offers a stage: everything that happens on it is practically forced to turn into a story, into a chamber piece in the middle of nowhere, into the stuff of literature.’
Islands are seductive because their tiny size and physical isolation makes them blank canvasses for our own dreams. We know that we can’t change the world or a continent, but just maybe an island is small enough to be moulded into our own personal arcadia. Islands can become repositories of our hopes and dreams. They allow us to streamline our version of reality into the form most acceptable to our ego. That’s essentially what Desert Island Discs is all about. An untouched island is even more alluring. One of the simple joys of the internet is being able to spend hours scrolling around Google Earth looking for obscure specks of land far out in the ocean and zooming in to see a nothing but a lonely rock. The flipside of the internet of course is that it has made the world so much smaller, meaning there’s very little out there that remains mysterious. But an island like Tristan de Cunha can only be reached on a mail ship twice a year and that’s it. So most of us are never ever going to go there. It will remain a lonely dot adrift in the fathomless blue, somewhere out there, existing, yet not existing – it is so remote it is almost an abstract idea. We can’t make these islands closer or more hospitable or go there for a honeymoon. Isn’t that exciting in this day and age?
The irony of all this idealistic dreaming is that within a few pages of the book you realise that these far-flung microcosms are seldom the wished-for place of happy arcadia. Rather than being perfect communities, islands are frequently witness to the worst of mankind’s evils. Atomic bomb tests, loneliness, war, rape, cannabalism and starvation are recurring events on these blasted shores. Instead of freeing us of our mortal sins, islands can instead magnify them.
Every single page of The Atlas of Remote Islands is as individual and enchanting as the island it describes. Here is a typical passage, part of the entry for Rudolf Island, lost in the Arctic Ocean, far north of Siberia
The compass shows that they have crossed the 82nd parallel north, a further invisible line in the snow which the lieutenant records on his silent map. In the evening, they reach the edge of Crown Prince Land. What lies before them is not a navigable sea, but a gigantic open expanse surrounded by old ice. Mountainous clouds shimmer on the horizon. The lieutenant sketches flowing lines on the piece of paper one last time: Cape Felder, Cape Sherard Osborn and the southern tip of Petermann Land. They drive the Austro-Hungarian flag into the rocky ground and cast a bottle containing a message off a cliff ledge. Words frozen for future witnesses:
Cape Fligely, 12 April 1874, 82°, 5°, northernmost point. Thus far and no further.
What a wonderful concept for a book. Back in the day we used to collect stamps from all the funny little islands we’d never visited (and were probably never likely to). This sort of thing reminds us how much geography and the laws of nature still keep us apart, allowing cultural differences to exist, despite google’s ongoing upgrades to global translation technology. Thank god.
yes that google stuff is pretty sci-fi isn’t it!! Wonder what the cultural ramifications will be
The book is one that is now most certainly on the list, I have a lifelong love of all things islandy, from coming within a gnat’s whisker of living and working on Rum in the late fifties through a fifty year obsession with with Skye, now mostly occupied by the metropolitan new age tribes and Jeremy Issacs.
There is another island book, sadly out of print and very hard to find…..A Family in Skye 1908 – 1916, by Isobel Macdonald
The 1914-18 war came, as Isobel recalls, ‘after a summer of sunshine and tranquillity’. May 1915 brought short, terrible telegrams to so many homes on the island, including Bank House. Wounded at Festubert, Isobel’s father died in 1916 and the family, taken south, did not return to Portree.
‘The bitterest part of my grief,’ Isobel writes,’was that I had not said goodbye to all the places by the sea or by the streams and woods that I loved as if they were people. I wanted to put my arms around every tree and kiss every rock before I left them’.
The battle of Festubert wiped out a large number of Skye’s male population deemed to be of fighting and dying age.
Fascinating discussion, worm – and a great recommendation, definitely one for the list.
Incidentally, ‘archipelago’ is one of my favourite words. I think it dates from reading Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books as a boy.
I can only repeat what the others have said: a smashing post and a wonderful concept for a book – would have made an ideal Chrissy prezzy for several relatives, but too late, darn it! I would suggest, as a companion publication, ‘The Arctic: A History’ by Richard Vaughan (now seeminly replaced by titles like ‘Icy Enigma’, ‘Hell Froze’ and ‘Thor’s Back Passage’) which also gives facscinating info about barren rocks named after Scandinavian Brewery magnates, Soviet youth movements, desk-bound British naval adminstrators and inbred Hapsburgs, and also details some incredible tales of survival there.
Malty, as a fellow islomaniac, I think you will like the book!
Gaw – it’s one of those books that you can imagine leaving in your bookcase for years and one day one of your kids will stumble across it and be absolutely transfixed and enchanted by it
Gadjo – many thanks for the recommendation, I have just purchased a new copy of The Arctic:A History in hardback for £2.18 from amazon!!!
Very happy that I could recommend something worthwhile, worm – I hope you enjoy it as much as I did 🙂
Great post Worm, I think I’ll have to get myself a copy. I love it when books, whether fictional or historical, come with maps included.
Bought this for Christmas for my wife, who looked at it once, put it down and hasn’t glanced at it since.
I, on the other hand, devoured it. It’s a lovely thing, well written and obsessively crafted.
Let’s be honest – I bought it for Christmas for me, and an excellent and very fine present it proved to be.
Ah yes that’s the man’s way to buy presents. “Well if you don’t want it I’ll just have to read/use/drink it myself.” Reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer buys Marge a bowling ball for her birthday.
“But it has ‘Homer’ engraved on it…”
“So you’d know who it’s from!”
yes Ian, I showed the book to my wife too, and she was equally unimpressed – perhaps remote islands are more of a man thing…