Judith Schalansky

A book called A Mapmaker's Dream by James Cowan tells a tale about a Renaissance monk Fra Mauro who lived and worked at St. Michael's Monastery on the Venetian island of Murano. He chose cartography as his religious vocation, but ironically his vows prevented him from traveling to gather information for his maps. Instead, travelers came to him. His life's work was a famous mappamundi (world map), which became an encyclopedic compendium of illustrations of and inscriptions about the known show more world in 1450.

Fast forward to the late twentieth century, East Germany before the Berlin wall fell, where the only people allowed to travel abroad were members of the Olympic team. A young girl entertains herself by pouring over an atlas of the world, filled with lands of many colors and blue oceans dotted with tiny islands named exotically, perhaps as a charm to prevent them from disappearing entirely in the blue vastness. It transports her to remote destinations.

Even after the fall of the wall and travel abroad suddenly becomes possible, "I had already grown used to traveling through the atlas by finger, whispering foreign names to myself as I conquered distant worlds in my parents' sitting room.”

Years later while studying graphic design this map lover chanced upon a cartographer's detailed sketch of a small island.

I imagined that the cartographer must have had to sketch this island, before he tried his hand at the mainland. It struck me for the first time that islands are in fact small continents, and that continents are in turn no more than very large islands. This clearly outlined piece of land was quite perfect and yet lost at the same time, like the loose sheet of paper on which it had been drawn. Every connection to the mainland had been lost. There was no mention of the rest of the world. I have never seen a lonelier place.

This describes perfectly the fifty maps of islands that make up this book, which was obviously inspired by the mapmaker's sketch.

The Atlas of Remote Islands is Judith Schalansky's book in every sense: she created the maps, she set the type and wrote the text. Knowing her story is as important to appreciating her book as knowing about the featured islands, all of which are real and whose histories are as strange and exotic to the reader as Fra Mauro's mappamundi was to his contemporaries. A hundred years after Fra Mauro, Ortelius created what is considered to be the first modern atlas of the world, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or theater of the world. Schalansky's modern incarnation is an homage to the cartography of former times. The historical vignettes she has composed to accompany each island map conjure up the hopes and realities, the joys and sufferings, the dreams and nightmares of the discoverers and settlers, as do the isolated, almost iconic islands standing alone in a blue background. And for the reader:

Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken, as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits — the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.

For all the imaginative pleasures that are to be found in this book, a few cautions are in order to avoid confusion. Do not look for lines of longitude or latitude, although map coordinates are stated on the facing page. While distances are given to the nearest land mass or other island, there are none of the usual map references to other geographical features. The historical vignettes are presented in the present tense, which lend an air of dreamy vagueness, but most events described took place long ago. Sometimes geographical features are mentioned which do not appear on the map, presumably because they no longer exist. Thus a disconnect arises between historical account and presumably up-to-date map.

In short, do not confuse this with a travel guide even though the publisher has mindlessly designated it “travel/reference”! Didn’t they read the text? It is intended to excite the imagination both in word and picture, to evoke dreams of wanderlust and the lore of exploration. These it accomplishes very well. The theater of the world indeed plays itself out in these remote islands. show less

Judith Schalansky studied art history and taught typography before she became a novelist, and her books are elegant design objects, even in paperback. Der Hals der Giraffe is beautifully designed and laid out, and is illustrated with carefully picked engravings that might (or might not) have come from old biology textbooks.

The book is a [Prime of Miss Jean Brodie] for the neue Bundesländer: an account of the schoolmistress-as-sociopath, set in a dying school in a small town in rural show more Pomerania, the top right-hand corner of the former DDR (Schalansky grew up in Greifswald, which is about as far as you can go to the north-east without being in Poland or getting your feet wet). Like her Scottish colleague, the biology teacher Inge Lohmark initially strikes us as an heroic figure, valiantly standing up for her values in a world where that is no longer appreciated, but we soon get the message that she isn't necessarily the ideal role-model of a teacher. By the end of the book, Schalansky has shown us what a monster Lohmark really is, but has done it in such a cunning and witty way that we still, in an odd way, seem to be on her side, despite everything.

Lohmark is middle-aged and in a job that will inevitably disappear in three or four years when the last child has left the school, her daughter has been away on a gap year in California for 15 years, and her marriage amounts to little more than sharing a house. But the main part of her problem seems to be the collapse of the DDR and the disappearance of the value-system she grew up in and which gave her a role and a structure to her life. She clearly isn't a socialist, and she doesn't want the old days back, but she feels adrift. The only solid thing she has to cling onto is her scientific education, with at its core Darwin's elegant and simple theory of evolution by natural selection. With that, she can arm herself against the annoyances of life in the new Germany and face the daily battle at the chalkface. Unfortunately, it turns out that rejecting all thoughts of tender emotions and orienting your life around the principle of the survival of the fittest is not a very good idea, particularly if you are (a) a dinosaur and (b) well beyond reproductive age. And even more dangerous if your headmaster is scheming to make the school "fit for the future". By the end of the book, she seems to be so far off the rails that she is teaching her class about the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

This is certainly a cruel novel: every bit as bitter and satirical as Muriel Spark's. But it's a delight to read. Schalansky moves smoothly backwards and forwards between the outer world of what Lohmark does and says and the inner world in which she aligns her experiences with the great truths of biology. show less

A quirky mix of essays and stories riffing on things that have been lost to history — species, books, buildings, paintings and films, amongst others. The essays/stories are often at a tangent to the ostensible topic, thus Murnau’s lost first film prompts a story about the elderly Garbo living in New York; a demolished chateau near Greifswald leads us into a memory of the author’s early life, and a lost Caspar David Friedrich painting into the description of her attempt to follow the show more river Ryck from source to sea.

The central idea seems to be that the Second Law of thermodynamics is reflected in all corners of human experience: our attempts to organise information in one place only result in disorder and destruction somewhere else. But an engaging and unpredictable read, anyway. show less

The concept is fascinating: each island is drawn in exquisite detail in black, white, and orange (for cities and roads) and stranded on an expanse of pale blue. The layout evokes the isolation, the constant threat of the ocean. On the facing page is a small bit of factual information about the island: size, population, name, language, latitude & longitude, distances from three nearest land masses, and a timeline of its discovery. Below that is the text of the book, a single paragraph telling show more the story of a single aspect of the island. It is brief, clipped almost, and highly poetic prose that sometimes borders on cliché (“feathered tribe” for example) and I wonder about the translator striking that balance between accessibly poetic and trite. Though the language can get saccharine (an unusual problem in my experience of translations from German, so something I definitely wondered about) the facts are exquisitely chosen.

In some cases she focuses on the people, or a person: a horrifying historical event (hundreds of babies dying of tetanus), or something so surreal as to be unbelievable (Marc Liblin learning Rapa in his dreams as a six year old living in France). Sometimes its an environmental disaster, or surprising geographical feature. Very few are unremarkable – like most books intended for a mass market audience the pieces are dense with sensationalism disguised as fact. And some of these stories are easily verified by internet searching (the tetanus epidemic), and the sensationalism of the telling becomes quickly justified. But others, like the Marc Liblin story, is more or less unverifiable.

As a proponent of lying in creative non-fiction it doesn’t trouble me too much. The idea is the more important thing, and stories can have an emotional truth without having a journalistic truth. She asserts as much in the introduction:

“That’s why the question whether these stories are ‘true’ is misleading. All text in the book is based on extensive research and every detail stems from factual sources. I have not invented anything. However I was the discoverer of the sources, researching them through ancient and rare books and I have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.” (20)

Of course the Marc Liblin story takes place in the 1960s, so sources would not have been in “ancient and rare books,” and yet the only hits from a google search are other reviews of this book. So what. The story has all the resonance of a Borges story, and for that reason I accept it as an imaginative truth if nothing else.

[Read the whole review: http://alluringlyshort.com/2013/06/15/atlas-of-remote-islands-by-judith-schlanas.... ] show less