The Island of Second Sight: A Novel - Softcover

Thelen, Albert Vigoleis

4.21

222 ratings by Goodreads

9781468307139: The Island of Second Sight: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1468307134 ISBN 13: 9781468307139

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2013

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Unavailable to English readers for more than 50 years, The Island of Second Sight is a masterpiece of world literature. Set in the years leading up to World War II, it is the fictionalized account of the time spent in Mallorca by the author and his wife, who encounter the most unpredictable and surreal adventures, pursued all the while by Nazis and Francoists. And just as the chaos comes to seem manageable, the Spanish Civil War erupts. Drawing comparisons to Don Quixote and The Man Without Qualities, The Island of Second Sight is a novel of astonishing and singular richness of language and purpose. At once ironic and humanistic, hilarious and profoundly serious, philosophical and grotesque, The Island of Second Sight is a literary tour de force.

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About the Author:

Albert Vigoleis Thelen (1903-1989) was a German writer and translator.

Donald O. White is a professor of German at Amherst College.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* On this balcony, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. With a bit of mischievously mendacious literary history, Vigo—the narrator-protagonist of this brilliant novel—gulls credulous German tourists. Based on the five difficult years that author Thelen and his wife, Beatrice, spent on Mallorca in the 1930s, this novel delivers the gritty texture of lived experience. But as Vigo recounts his (mis)adventures, readers realize that, like Cervantes’ visionary knight, Vigo sees things others do not. While living in a dirty Mallorcan bordello, Vigo transforms himself into a chivalric champion defending his beloved against threatening dragon-rats. Like Quixote assaulting windmill-giants, Vigo declares war against his Nazified German homeland—by buying an American typewriter rather than a German one. But Vigo’s quixotic crusade takes on a dangerously real edge when he uses his typewriter to denounce the f�hrer. Yet, like Quixote escaping from a perilously enchanted castle, Vigo and his wife escape from an island descending into the maelstrom of civil war. To be sure, this modern Quixote wields a sardonic sense of humor quite lacking in his literary predecessor. But that humor finally becomes Vigo’s own imaginative weapon against an all-too-ugly reality. Readers will thank a gifted translator for finally making this masterpiece—acclaimed by Thomas Mann—available to English speakers. --Bryce Christensen

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