Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

"Schalansky is a designer to trade, and this book is an extraordinary testament to her skill – very plain, bold colours, printed in black, blue and orange ink, it takes the reader through a personal library of remote islands that really are remote – the likes of Bouvet island, where there was a nuclear bomb tested that almost went unnoticed, or even Juan Fernandez, where Selkirk was marooned. Each island gets a new map and has an accompanying text. To be honest, to my mind the accompanying texts are a little hit-and-miss in terms of their appeal, but the map images are so gorgeous that the pleasure of flicking through the book isn’t impacted at all. Yes of course! There’s a secret tribe of us cartophiles out there, flicking restlessly through atlases, admiring places that we’ll never actually manage to visit in real life, but which nonetheless hold us spellbound within the pages of the atlas. Lawrence has such a jaundiced eye; he once wrote from the French Îles d’Hyères I don’t care for islands, especially very small ones. That short story is a kind of warning, I think, about the egomania that can be implicit within the desire for solitude. Because Lawrence’s protagonist is a rich man who owns his own archipelago, and has the resources to buy ever more remote islands, there’s nothing to stop him sinking into a kind of misanthropic frenzy. I’ll just add below a little bit about the story that I wrote into one of the conclusions of Island Dreams : There’s an unwholesome puritanism about Lawrence’s island lover, the rich man seeking his protected domain with the kind of obsessive intolerance that turns loyalty to bigotry, love into hate. His love of islands leads him to abandon family and friends, to seek doom and oblivion. At the end he dies muttering: The elements! The elements! I think Lawrence’s protagonist becomes a kind of Kurtz-like figure, and like Conrad’s story about the Congo , it’s a cautionary story about the terrors that can be unleashed by the ego when it can pursue whatever it wants, unrestrained. Which brings me to another theme of Island Dreams , which is the idea from psychotherapy, and in particular the writings of Donald Winnicott, that we all need a measure of isolation in order to retain our psychological and emotional health. Too much isolation and we become insulated to the world (Winnicott’s distinction), but with recourse to isolation we have the opportunity to pause, reflect, recharge, and be better versions of ourselves."