Abstract
Like its previous English language edition, The Atlas of Remote Islands (2010), and its German original, Atlas der abgelgenen Inseln (2009), Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands is a beautifully designed compendium of, as its subtitle states, ‘fifty islands I have not visited and never will’. The exploration and charting of the 50 remote islands of Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas is as much concerned with scientific accuracy (statistics and facts about each island have been rigorously researched; the cartographical representations of each island or archipelago are rigorously made, and all to a scale of 1:20,000), as it is with the very idea of an island or sense of islandness – the cultural importance of the island across history. Indeed, Schalansky’s introduction (new to the Pocket Atlas edition) concludes: ‘this atlas is therefore primarily a poetic project. Now that it is possible to travel right round the globe, the real challenge lies in staying at home and discovering the world from there’.
What is clear from Schalansky’s original introduction as well as her care in the atlas’s illustration, design, and typesetting, is that the poetics of the atlas and of the island are necessarily precise yet replete with a productive whimsy. Perfect maps, verso side, are preceded, side recto, by statistics, and overleaf, each island is accompanied by some relevant tale − time and point-of-view non-specific − in its history. The Pocket Atlas is less an advocacy of armchair travel (as the new introduction seems to imply) than it is a plea for the renewal of appreciation for the affective, and a testament to the power of the imagination. Just as the map, or atlas, and the related acts of charting and naming, have always been in some ways an attempt to circumscribe the globe, Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas calls into question this colonial power-play and mode of representation, whilst at the same time acknowledging the necessity of exploration and scientific discovery, and their origins in voyages of the imagination.
The Pocket Atlas exhibits all of its author-designer’s yearning for and imaginary quests towards island spaces: islands and tales of islands excite the imagination, and much of this excitement and fascination lends itself to the atlas’s aesthetic impulses. And yet, the stories of the islands recounted over the pages of the Pocket Atlas make no concession to the over-romanticized view of the island ideal or utopia. Quite as many islands are barren and unforgiving as they are cornucopic, and all, in their remoteness, isolate in person but will pique the most far away imagination. The Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands sits between fact and fiction; it is at once an art-book, a text-book, and a short-story collection; a portable guide to imaginary travel. Like the idea of islandness itself, The Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands exists in a cultural between-space, provoking thought through its presence on the edges of the many discourses that accrete to inform our idea of islands. That this book has run into a pocket edition, and has been translated into many languages, attests to the ultimate translatability of a sense of islandness, and the widespread fascination that this provokes.