I had never heard of this book before encountering it on a display shelf at Half Price Books. "One of the greatest books of the twentieth century," says Thomas Mann, but it was the other blurb on the cover that hooked me: "Farcical, byzantine, and philosophical... One of the most unusual and entertaining books I have ever read" –– The New York Times Book Review. Farcical! Byzantine! Philosophical! The back cover revealed one more tidbit that convinced me I had to read the 750-page German novel: "Winner of the 2013 PEN Translation Prize."
The Island of Second Sight is a fictionalized memoir –– "a book of recollections shaped by poetic means" –– about the author's time as a German expatriate in Mallorca during the 1930s. The first half is largely about their adventures in poverty; the second about their travails as outspoken critics of the rising fascist regimes in Germany and Spain. The tone is comic; the entertainment comes from the elaborate cosmopolitan prose style. People will praise an actor by saying they would listen to him read the phone book; I will praise Thelen by saying I would read a phone book he had written. I can't comment on the accuracy of the translation, but it was certainly an impressive feat given the constant wordplay.
The book is composed of a series of incidents more than a developing narrative. It is divided into Books based on the author's residence at the time: his brother-in-law's home, a rooming house owned by a Count, a bordello in a converted stable, a mostly empty apartment. There are numerous comic set pieces (weaving through Palma to avoid their creditors; hanging their belongings from the rafters of their tiny bordello room to protect them from the rats; serving as an unreliable tourist guide) and colorful Dickensian characters both human and animal. Piece by piece, indirectly, the book paints a picture of Mallorca, Spanish society, and the German diaspora during the rise of the Nazis. The stakes get more serious as the years pass, culminating in a positively tense epilogue about avoiding execution as they negotiate departure from the island.
"Vigoleis can never stick to his subject. He's not a nuclear scientist, and always finds more interesting things going on at the margins." In a book this long and digressive, there are inevitably sections that drag, where the comedy falls flat and you want the author to return to the main story. I found that the entertaining sections far outweighed the leaden ones, but I suppose your mileage may vary.
