The line maps are beautiful, but I’m no sailor.
This guy on Amazon was dissatisfied though: Schalansky’s Atlas is not-exactly history, not-exactly prose-poetry-it seems to evoke its own genre out of preexisting modes. And the thunderous echo of waves breaking against the hollows of the jagged coastline never ceases.” Of the antipodes the author writes, “cattle that are brought here die quickly and quietly in the dun-colored steppes of grass. Facts sit side-by-side with a kind of highly personal fiction we are given latitudes and detailed maps, but also lore and speculation.
Kilda in the Atlantic, the Carolines of Micronesia, the American Pagan-is a prose poem of sorts. The book looks serious, until you read that quirky subtitle: it looks like a pocket atlas. At least, not too precious-despite the somewhat whimsical conceit, the author approaches her idiosyncratic task with seriousness. The subtitle is Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, but don’t worry: this book isn’t precious. There’s a book I’ve returned to again and again, ever since its clementine-orange cover first caught my eye at a museum bookstore: A Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, translated from the German by Christine Lo. It’s a beautiful big little small expansive book, as Sadie Stein attests in The Paris Review: (For reading the whale book again, I think?) I have no idea how Judith Schalansky’s Atlas was not on my atlas until earlier this month when BLCKDGRD sent me a copy.
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