Set on Mallorca in the 1930s in the years leading up to World War II, it is the fictionalized account of the time spent there by author--writing as Vigoleis, his alter-ego--and his wife, Beatrice, lured to the island by Beatrice’s dying brother, who, as it turns out not dying at all but broke and ensnared by the local prostitute. Pursued by both the Nazis and Spanish Francoists, Vigoleis and Beatrice embark on a series of the most unpredictable and surreal adventures in order to survive. Low on money, the couple seeks shelter in a brothel for the military, serves as tour guides to groups of German tourists, and befriends such literary figures Robert Graves and Harry Kessler, as well as the local community of smugglers, aristocrats, and exiled German Jews. Vigoleis with his inventor hat on even creates a self-inflating brassiere. Then the Spanish Civil War erupts, presenting new challenges to their escape plan. Throughout, Vigoleis is an irresistibly engaging narrator; by turns amusing, erudite, naughty, and always utterly entertaining. 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; the story is picaresque, the voice ironic, the detail often hilarious, yet it is a work of profound seriousness, with an anti-war, anti-fascist, humanistic attitude at its core. With a style ranging from the philosophical to the grotesque, the colloquial to the arcane, The Island of Second Sight is a literary tour de force.

The Island of Second Sight: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Thelen, Albert Vigoleis

Contemporary

The Overlook Press

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.

Review\n"Farcical, byzantine, and philosophical. One of the most unusual and entertaining novels I have ever read." The New York Times\nIt is impossible to give a concise summary of this extraordinary novel that's been likened to Cervantes's Don Quixote, not only because of its scale, but also because of its baroque beauty. It is uniquely humorous, engrossingly contemptuous of the political climate before Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s, and an unrivalled linguistic masterpiece. It is totally unlike anything else, a tissue woven of many strands, full of irony and sarcasm and yet deeply human(istic) and erudite, and could easily be the funniest book ever written in German.\nThelen has by far the largest vocabulary of any German author (including Goethe, who normally takes the statistical lead), and as if that wasn't enough, he creates dozens of new words to convey particular nuances and shades of meaning or satire. Vigo/Vigoleis, the author's alter ego, a determined opponent of Hitler and his Nazi regime, and his multilingual wife (Beatrice from Basle) are urgently called to Majorca to the deathbed of Beatrice's brother (Zwingli, aka Don Helvecio). Only he isn't dying, as they discover when they arrive, but totally broke and sexually ensnared by a local prostitute who is making his life a misery. As a loving sister, Beatrice pays off his debts, and thus begins the unusual island adventures of the German-Swiss couple, their many struggles and encounters with the most bizarre collection of characters, indigenous and other, on Majorca. They are close to starvation some of the time, seek shelter in a remote farmhouse that acts as a brothel for the military while doubling up as a smuggler's den, but they are masters of the art of survival.\nThe novel was a huge bestseller in Germany, France, Spain and Holland after its first publication in 1953. But it took until 2008 to track down a brilliant English translation by a Amherst professor of German, Donald White, who had completed the work as a labour of love over 20 years. This translation then went on to win the 2013 PEN Best Translation award following Galileo’s publication of the novel, which now reissues the book in a smaller format and with an afterword by Jurgen Putz, a leading expert on Thelen’s writing.

The Island of Second Sight

Galileo Publishers

Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts.

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Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts: Aus den angewandten Erinnerungen des Vigoleis

Genre Fiction

Ullstein Taschenbuchvlg

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