The Island of Second Sight

August 27, 2012
First published in Germany in 1953, this epic, autobiographical tale of prewar Germans living abroad is a charming if exhausting blend of cultural self-examination and picaresque adventure. Thelen takes meta-fiction to extremes, mixing first-person confession and third-person narrative, beginning when Vigoleis (the author, thinly disguised) and Beatrice (Thelenâs undisguised Swiss companion) travel from Amsterdam to Mallorca in 1931 to care for Beatriceâs brother, Zwingli, who suffers not from some fatal disease but from his connection with the seductive, mercurial María del Pilar. Vigoleis and Beatrice soon find themselves hopelessly entangled in Zwingliâs debt-riddled, filth-ridden downward spiral, eventually taking up residence in a brothel frequented by bullfighters. They support themselves by writing, translating, and serving as tour guides for the wealthy until even this hard-won existence is threatened by the Spanish Civil War and Hitlerâs expansion. What keeps such an anthology of misfortunes noteworthy after sixty years is its unique combination of comedy and meditation on everything from the pleasures of a tertulia to the horror of Nazi atrocities. Even when the author-narratorâs observations prove overwhelming, his cultural insights, historical laments, literary references, and abundant wit make this first English translation (by Amherst professor White) and the book itself a literary achievement.

Starred review from September 15, 2012
A vast novel--if novel it is--of the tangled lives of anti-Nazi Germans on the Spanish island of Majorca in the years leading up to World War II. Some of those Germans were communists, others Jews; all were destined to be denounced, and many killed, when Franco's soldiers finished their fascist revolution with the help of the Third Reich. That's a grim matter of history, but Thelen (1903-1989) is anything but grim for much of this book, which was published in Germany in 1953 and has enjoyed a somewhat uneasy stance as a classic ever since--somewhat uneasy, that is, because it deals with matters that many Germans of the time would have just as soon forgotten. Even on dark matters, though, Thelen squeezes in unlikely jokes "A Spaniard who is ready to shoot today instead of tomorrow--how very odd!" he exclaims. Or rather, his alter ego, named Vigoleis and married, as was Thelen, to a woman named Beatrice, exclaims. To call this a roman a clef is to risk making too much of the connection between the author's life and that of his protagonist, though one wonders whether this book is fictional in the same sense that Kenneth Rexroth's An Autobiographical Novel is fiction--that is to say, not much at all. Whatever the case, Vigoleis is a sharp-eyed observer of his fellow Germans, both those on the island and those left far back home in the untender hands of Herr Hitler. Vigoleis may wish for detachment--he describes early on his "congenital aversion to contact with the external world"--but he becomes the unlikely center of a wheel whose spokes are both Spanish and German, and he is expected to perform miracles on behalf of all concerned. Of one clergy-hating Majorcan who asks him to invent a gallows that could humanely kill a priest "in a single stroke," he notes, "I referred him to my fellow countrymen in the Third Reich, who were now the experts in mass executions." Fortunately, Vigoleis--like Thelen in real life--manages to get away before he himself is the subject of an execution, leaving behind his beloved island, not quite a paradise but not quite a slaughterhouse, foreboding imagery notwithstanding. Worthy of a place alongside On the Marble Cliffs, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Death of Virgil and other modernist German masterworks; a superb, sometimes troubling work of postwar fiction, deserving the widest possible audience.

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October 15, 2012

Thomas Mann called this novel "one of the best books of the 20th century." The Times Literary Supplement called it "a masterpiece." American readers will at last have the opportunity to read this celebrated novel, first published in Germany in 1953 and now translated into English for the first time, and judge for themselves. Set in the early 1930s in Mallorca, this is a witty, exuberant book, perhaps best described as a modern picaresque novel following in the tradition of Don Quixote, a work Thelen mentions quite often in these pages. The story follows two bohemian intellectuals, Vigoleis and Beatrice, who initially come to Mallorca to comfort Beatrice's ailing mother but soon find themselves embroiled in a series of wild and colorful misadventures in the Mallorcan demimonde. Thelen narrates these adventures with charm and self-effacing humor while also exploring deeper thematic elements, including the pathologies that enabled the rise of Hitler and national socialism in Europe. VERDICT This unique and appealing novel is enthusiastically recommended for fans of world literature.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2012
On this balcony, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. With a bit of mischievously mendacious literary history, Vigothe narrator-protagonist of this brilliant novelgulls 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 homelandby 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 fuhrer. 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 masterpieceacclaimed by Thomas Mannavailable to English speakers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)