Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary [Hardcover]

Bill Holm (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 5, 2000

Eccentric Islands is a literary expedition across the map to islands both actual and imagined. Part traveler's journal, part philosophical exploration, the book asks whether islands encourage eccentricity and genius in humans, as scientists argue they do in the natural world. Essayist Bill Holm journeys to five physical islands: Iceland, Madagascar, Molokai, Isla Mujeres, and Mallard Island in northern Minnesota. He also visits islands of ideas, including the Necessary Island of the Imagination and the whimsical piano island, located in the man-made lake under the atrium-sky of an upscale hotel in the remote interior of China. Writing with the mind-set of a 19th-century traveler, for whom the journey is as important as the destination, Holm introduces wonderful characters and cultures.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Island is both thing and metaphor. Without the weight of things, metaphors turn vapid, sour, empty, fly off into space and connect with nothing.... Islands are good to think on if a man would express himself neatly." Poet and essayist Holm (Coming Home Crazy; The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth) offers an eloquent meditation on beauty, genius and isolation. From the metaphorical islands of pain (both physical and spiritual: "You are not a human being. You are not you. You are pain. You have been islanded") and the piano ("the piano, though a public instrument, is, for those who love it, a private world") to rock-solid islands like Molokai in Hawaii, Holm's ability to link the specific and the broad is both beautiful and wise ("We have always needed lepers. Someone has to be unclean. LeprosyDor AIDSDbecomes thus, not a disease, but a profession, even a vocation in the religious sense"). The author, whose surname, appropriately, means "island" in Icelandic, also makes two journeys, one in 1979 and another in 1999, to the homeland of his forefathers, where he celebrates the Icelanders' resilience and language. Like a modern-day Thoreau, Holm convincingly "downsiz[es] the universe in order to get a better look at it." These essays are replete with pith and humor; for all his observations, Holm's willingness to poke fun at himself will reassure thoughtful readers that he is both as ordinary and extraordinary as they are. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Icelandic by blood, itinerant Minnesotan writer and teacher Holm was destined to become an island aficionado: his name means "island" in Old Norse. Having conjured a desert island beneath a cottonwood tree in the vast sea of his farmer father's fields as a boy, Holm knows that while islands are useful as microcosms, they can engender delusions, and he holds this yin-yang vision firmly in mind as he chronicles various island sojourns throughout the world. A true raconteur, Holm is as philosophical as he is descriptive, as funny as he is feisty, and he voices bracing opinions on everything from the inanity of resorts to our obsession with money. He recounts the tragic history of the steeply cliffed Hawaiian island of Molokai, once home to a leper colony overseen by the heroic Father Damien; sings the praises of beautiful, musical, and poor Madagascar; and, in the book's most heartfelt sections, portrays his ancestral land, celebrating Iceland's volatile landscape, rich literature, and tenacious inhabitants. Vibrant, adventurous, and empathic, Holm relishes the uniqueness of each place even as he recognizes that, like each person, each island is but a link in the chain of life. Bonnie Smothers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions; 1st edition (September 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571312455
• ISBN-13: 978-1571312457
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,891,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Along for the journey, October 4, 2000

By 

Joy A. Yucaitis (Watertown, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary (Hardcover)

Eccentric Islands is a magic carpet that takes you along on journeys as they are best experienced. Mr. Holm provides enough detail of his physical journey to allow you to travel vicariously. In addition, he invites you on the mental trips that accompany his corporeal travel, down paths of history and philosophy. The narrative is entertaining, and the flights of fancy are just enough for me to recognize myself in his journey without the dreariness of endless self-reflection. I encourage fans of Bill Bryson to pick up this book (though there is far less humor than your typical Bryson book). I read it on an airplane, wishing I was headed on an adventure rather than a business flight from Minneapolis to Boston.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful tour of real and imaginary islands, January 22, 2004

By 

Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary (Hardcover)

Author Bill Holm has produced in this work a wonderful, eclectic, almost at times rambling (but wonderfully so) tour of a number of islands. Many are actual islands he writes about, places where one can journey to; Madagascar, Isla Mujeres or the Island of Women near Cancun off the Mexican coast, Molokai (part of the Hawaiian Islands, once a leper colony, that chapter fascinating and touching centering as it does on the saintly efforts of Father Damien de Veuster and his care for the unfairly maligned and ill-treated lepers cruelly exiled there), and Mallard Island in Minnesota. Some islands he visits are not actual physical places, a few "states of consciousness" which he writes so "resemble islands that they deserve the geographic name," such as the island of music (Holm, a great lover of pianos, clavichords, and harpsichords, describes how producing music can be an island-like experience in a wonderful, wide-ranging chapter that goes into a great deal of history behind these instruments) and the island of pain (how great physical or emotional pain can isolate oneself from others). Clearly this is a different travel book, one thematically organized rather than simply a description of places, experiences, and detailing the history, politics, cuisine, and culture of the particular places visited by the author.

The largest section of the book - and my favorite part by far - was two rather lengthy chapters describing Holm's experiences in Iceland. A descendent of Icelandic immigrants who grew up in Minnesota, he spent time there in 1979 teaching English and then revisited the island again twenty years later. Clearly loving the place and the people especially, Holm provided for me a wonderful introduction of a place I would now very much like to visit.

We learn that Iceland is a surprisingly small country, an isolated island in the North Atlantic about the size of Ohio (about 40,000 square miles), inhabited by about a quarter million people, most of whom live around the capital and largest city of Reykjavik, and that so sparse has the population of Iceland been through the centuries that only 800,000 Icelanders have ever lived (leading perhaps he says to the sometimes hobby sometimes obsession of many in Iceland with genealogy). A hard island to live on sometimes, first settled in 874 (though a few scattered Irish monks did call the place home before that), the population declined due to the Black Plague in the 14th century, smallpox in the early 18th century, and two large volcanic eruptions in 1783 and 1875, both of which caused massive famine by burying hayfields and killing sheep (it was due to the latter eruption that Holm's great-grandfathers moved to Minnesota). Indeed physically Iceland is a rugged country, subject to volcanic eruptions (the island is still growing, as the volcanic mid-Atlantic ridge bifurcates Iceland) and earthquakes (the author himself experienced a minor one in 1998), ninety percent barren lava and rugged volcanic desert, interspersed with several glaciers, tundra, and boiling fumaroles, occasionally tortured by fierce Arctic gale-force blasts of wind off the polar icecap.

Holm describes a number of the most interesting places in Iceland, such as Pingvellir or the Parliament Plain, an oasis in the southwestern corner of the country where Icelanders first met in 1000 to respond to an ultimatum King Olaf of Norway to become Christian and stop horse eating and infant exposure, this meeting the foundation Icelandic law and the world's first true democracy (differing from the Greek in that in Iceland women could vote too), which with Gullfoss (Golden Falls, one of many magnificent waterfalls in the country), and Geysir (the original geyser, now largely spent and worn out) form the so-called Golden Triangle of tourist attractions in Iceland.

I learned many interesting aspects of Icelandic culture. Icelanders for instance love to dress up to entertain - even in tuxedos and elegant dresses - even in the worst weather. They have a great love of giving flowers for nearly any occasion, even for mere visits over coffee. He was continually touched when even on his return he found that concerns of crime and even the security of their nation's leader were nearly non-existent. Holm sampled a number of Icelandic delicacies, including puffin, svartfugl (guillemot; a sea bird), italskt spaggetti (ground mutton, onion, and ketchup basically), svio (blackened, singed sheep's head), and lots of fish, preferred either boiled or prepared as siginn fiskur (fish hung, dried, and aged outdoors).

Outside the major cities many of those in rural Iceland - generally farmers - he found are often quite isolated; Holm found in 1979 that the national highway that circled the island was often a rough gravel track filled with pot-holes, 16-percent grades down steep mountainsides, and areas where the road was completely washed out even. He found quite a bit of improvement upon his return twenty years later but still many areas were a challenging drive. Indeed he took advantage of this isolation on his first visit there to live for a summer with an Icelandic farming family; Holm wanted to learn to speak Icelandic to a better degree (having great trouble with its "consonantal clots, trilled rs, and long soulful diphthongs"), but found that in the major cities everyone spoke English fluently and generally did not let him "butcher" their language - only in an isolated rural settlement were there people who spoke little or no English. Iceland is a very much a nation of writers and of readers, producing many fine novelists - several of which have been translated into English - as well as the famous Icelandic sagas. The author was touched upon his first trip to find people in restaurants, stores, and in their cars enthralled by a reading of one of the nation's great novels, Halldor Laxness's _Independent People_, glued to the radio as the story of Bjartur of Summerhouses unfolded, a saga centering around an uneducated, gruff sheep farmer whose all-consuming desire to be independent and beholden to no one leads to tragic consequences for him and his family.

A wonderful book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a book for those without soul, November 6, 2003

By 

S. WATSON (Door County) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary (Hardcover)

Although I'm a travel essay collector and snob, never has any author told me a story that made me break down in sobs for four pages (236-240). This is now one of my favorite books. I found it by accident, due to an interest in Madagascar and Iceland, but every island described here will enlighten you.

There are a million average writers out there, knocking out non-fiction books on the most menial of topics, but Bill Holm is that rare author who not only feels his topics thoroughly, he has the prose at hand to describe those feelings. And though his subject matter is far from menial, I would read whatever he cares to write about after reading this book. Bravo!