Atlas of Remote Islands

This fascinating little gem of a book is concerned with tiny, largely unknown islands scattered around the world. Schalansky essentially selected them largely for how far they are from big, continental lands. Even after spending a significant portion of my life at sea, I can only claim to have visited or even sailed within sight of about a dozen of them. Most of these small atolls are far from their mother countries. But each of these isolated islands has a story that is inextricably tied to the sea.

Having grown up on a desert island (Mount Desert Island in Maine, to be precise), I’ve always loved tales of imaginary islands, from Thomas More’s Utopia to Spidermonkey Island in Hugh Lofting’s Voyages of Doctor Doolittle. Judith Schalansky’s atlas offers us a cornucopia of actual islands that she’s recreated in her imagination on the basis of travelers’ accounts; her book is subtitled Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will.  She gives us meticulously drawn maps of each island, with a facing-page hinting at the tangled history of its discovery, settlement, or abandonment. “Paradise is an… show more.

What an odd book this is and how appealing. It’s as much art as geography. Schalansky’s style is cool and dry: she maps her unvisited islands and writes a little account of each. One of her fifty is Banaba Island, sitting thousands of miles from anywhere in the middle of the Pacific. It’s somehow comforting and moving to see its bays and hills, to acknowledge its existence and just let it be.