atlas of remote islands by judith schalansky

She is out of breath, and her breasts rise and fall as she asks for a bottle of something. Suddenly a neighbor runs up to him, completely naked, wet from bathing, her hair plastered to her golden skin. For the South Pacific island of Pukapuka, she describes an American settler, Robert Dean Frisbie, sitting on the veranda of his small store: Schalansky is drawn to such stark islands and the stories that unfold on them, though she does occasionally evoke the Edenic side of the island experience. It is comforting to think that there must be something more than the here and now.” Yet once they’ve actually made landfall, explorers have often found these Edens to be barren and inhospitable. So is hell.” She writes about the double nature of distant islands, which people have often thought of as “the perfect place for utopian experiments” (here we can think of More’s Utopia itself) and as “paradise on earth.” As she says, “Revolutions break out on ships, and utopias are lived on islands. Her preface is entitled “Paradise is an island. In a preface, Schalansky says that “miniature worlds are created on these small continents,” and her prose poems in turn are miniature epics, typically based in some document that she has uncovered in her library in Berlin and then imbued with a poet-novelist’s vision. Schalansky meticulously drew each island to the same scale of 1:125,000, and as a result some islands crowd the margins of her oversize pages, while others are lost in a sea of blue:īoth in its overall project and in the predominant melancholy of its descriptions, the Atlas has a good deal in common with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which we visited in our fourth week, though in place of invisible cities Schalansky gives us unvisited islands.

Each entry is headed with a selective timeline and a set of distances to other far-away places, together with a thumbnail hemispheric sketch to show the island’s location. Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands (2009) goes so far as literally to draw an entire atlas of islands, each of them given a short description - really, a prose poem - on the facing page.

As we’ve seen this week, island-based writers have often drawn connections with islands elsewhere, imaginatively crossing vast differences of time and space.

Atlas of remote islands by judith schalansky