In a preface, Schalansky says that “miniature worlds are created on these small continents,” and her prose poems in turn are miniature epics, typically based in some document that she has uncovered in her library in Berlin and then imbued with a poet-novelist’s vision. Schalansky meticulously drew each island to the same scale of 1:125,000, and as a result some islands crowd the margins of her oversize pages, while others are lost in a sea of blue:īoth in its overall project and in the predominant melancholy of its descriptions, the Atlas has a good deal in common with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which we visited in our fourth week, though in place of invisible cities Schalansky gives us unvisited islands. Each entry is headed with a selective timeline and a set of distances to other far-away places, together with a thumbnail hemispheric sketch to show the island’s location. Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands (2009) goes so far as literally to draw an entire atlas of islands, each of them given a short description - really, a prose poem - on the facing page. As we’ve seen this week, island-based writers have often drawn connections with islands elsewhere, imaginatively crossing vast differences of time and space.
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