Customer Reviews

Islandia

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In browsing Amazon.com I was delighted to find "Islandia" back in print after years when one could only acquire it in second-hand book stores. That print history is a shame, because the book is among the great Utopian novels of the 20th century. And, as you will note from the remarkable consistency of the comments by earlier reviewers on this site, it has spoken deeply to a good many people.

I first encountered it in a freshman lit course at Dartmouth College in 1967, and I since have read it again twice--and each time it spoke to one's life. Because while in one sense it is a Utopian novel advocating a set of values for the ideal society, it also speaks directly to the choices individuals face in how to live their own lives and in that respect it echoes Henry David Thoreau.

Islandia at the surface level is an adventure/romantic story and a good one, though not without flaws and a few too many emotional twists and turns in its 1000 pages, as it describes the adventures (both in events and romance) of young American John Lang assigned as US consul in the early 20th century to Islandia, a distant and exotic but essentially Western agrarian nation with some very progressive views (esp. at the time Wright was writing the book over 60 years ago) on sexual freedom, female equality, and sensitivity to aesthetics and the environment; yet also with a deep respect for tradition. Wright in creating this society for his novel was trying to transcend modern "left and right" political values to combine some of the best features of both as a prescription for how to create a humane and satisfying society.

But I said the novel was also about individual choice, and ultimately John Lang has to choose between return to the high-stress, high sensory input industrial society from which he came, and a commitment to Islandia as an agrarian culture of deep and rich values but less "motion" in life--a quieter, if in some ways very satisfying, existence. And Wright does not pull punches about the difficulties of the choice. That is a choice many of us face now in the modern world--between a more inner directed life of values and contemplation, or the outward directed life of events and action in a high-stress environment. This book is brilliant in drawing the distinctions, in framing the choice, and I suspect that is one reason why it has appealed so deeply to many of those who have read it.

I first read this book in 1946 at the age of 19. I read it through in one sitting and came out of the experience speaking Islandan better than English. I found in the book a minor character upon whom I wished to model my behavior and hoped to achieve the same position in my relationships.

Structurally this in not a good novel but then it was never intended to be a novel. The mood of the book parallels the emotions of the protagonist. When he is up--the book is up. When he is going through his disappointment in his thwarted love affair the book drags. When he is doing his "buckling and swashiling" toward the end of the book it is a great book of action. There are too many antclimaxes.

I have re-read this book several times a decade and each time leave it with a deep sense of satisfaction that Austin Wright had this dream and we are allowed to share it.

I found this book after reading about it in a essay by Ursula Le Guin. (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed) You will not hear about it from your local bookstore, or from school, and until recently you would have had an extremely hard time even buying it. I found my copy 1942 HB (Tan) in a used bookstore for three dollars years ago and it never leaves my nightstand. I understand that there will be some who simply don't understand the allure of the uptopian book, and they would probally find it boring. The reviewer who found the author long winded would be amazed that only half the book acutually got published, over 1,000 pages were edited before the first printing.

It is one of the last elegant books, and the flavor of the early 20th century runs through it. It is a book that you can read to your children before bed, and too yourself anytime. It deserves shelf space next to Dickens and Tolkien. I cannot reccomend this book enough. Everyone should have a copy.

This is my very favorite book, bar none, and has been since I first read it 20 years ago. Hero John Lang attends Harvard (Class of 1905) with Dorn, a young man from Islandia, a mysterious, xenophobic country struggling to deal with incursions from rest of the world. Upon graduating, he finds himself unable to choose a career, so he decides to use his language skill (Dorn teaches him Islandian one summer vacation in Maine) and is granted a rarely-issued entry visa. Though he never truly fits in, he becomes involved in Islandia's curious culture in various ways, and ends up at the crux of a national debate there, related in part to a German military threat. (Islandia is on the northern end of an Australia-like continent, never clearly located but probably in the far southern Pacific.) Wright carried Islandia in his head, expanding it from a childhood fantasy into hundreds of thousands of words of narrative and description of the place. [Sailing on Cape Cod once, he remarked that a particular bay looked just like another in Islandia.] He was killed in a car accident in Las Vegas in 1931, and his editor and family took 11 years to cut about 70% of his words to winnow the book to its still formidable length (it's 1,000 pages long). The book is wonderfully written and edited, with a smooth, lovely style. It's a bit slow by contemporary standards, but the description of Islandia's language, e.g. there are 4 words for love (romantic, strong friendship, desire, and one unique to Islandia's family-centric society), culture, and country, are beautifully done. Example: he's helping plow one day, and is horrified to find human remains right in the main field. His hosts quietly explain that when people die, they are of course returned to the land they loved, and they carefully return the bones to the furrow. In subsequent conversation, his hosts are equally horrified to hear how corpses are handled in America. The plot tracks John Lang's development from a young man, through his coming-of-age, finding himself, and coming to terms with his simultaneous love for and alienness in Islandia, and ultimately accepting who he is. First published in 1942, it was a minor cult classic in the early '60s, and though it's a bit dated in terms of feminism, for example, it remains my favorite book of all time. If there was an Islandia, I'd be there now...

Reading ISLANDIA is like visiting another country, one I would love to visit and might even consider living in. The world-building of Austin Tappan Wright drew me in and kept me entranced for 1000 pages. This is one of the very few novels that I revisit and reread, one of the few I've gone out looking for in a first edition. The characters are complex and endearing. The style is leisurely. There really is a plot, honest. But the book doesn't depend on the plot. It depends on the exploration of a different society and the interactions of its people with a young and naive American.

I had decided to write an amazon.com note about ISLANDIA before I saw that my name is on the "readers who bought ISLANDIA also bought books by..." list -- but the list made my day.

Vonda N. McIntyre

Islandia is a masterpiece. It is a utopian novel about a
high culture, low technology society, but a utopia without
glib answers and with real-world problems. It is a rich
and detailed creation of a country, its society, and its
people. The Islandians have developed a simple way of life
that gives broad scope for individual fulfillment and the
living of a happy, healthy, natural life through the
enjoyment of work, love and friendship, craft, and the
beauty of nature. Since this is the story of an American
in Islandia, there are many contrasts between the American
and Islandian way of life. It is impossible to describe
the richness of this book; it has to be experienced to be
understood. The plot is dramatic, the characters have
great depth, the dialogue is fascinating, and the writing
is beautiful. I have already read it three times, even
though it's 1000 pages. It is a pleasure to read and
highly rewarding.

I could gush for pages and pages about this marvelous book, but the other reviews here can tell you pretty much everything you would want to know. I'm adding my comments as well to strongly urge you to purchase Islandia -- it's worth buying at any price.

For a month this summer I was a witness to life in the simple but beautiful nation of Islandia through the eyes of the protagonist, John Lang. He becomes friends with an Islandian native, Dorn, while at Harvard, and after graduation is appointed consul to Islandia. There he experiences a full life of romance, adventure, politics, intrigue, and the clash of two incompatible cultures. Ultimately he must decide what really matters in life.

The book's evocative descriptions of Islandia are all beautifully done. I found myself time and time again thinking that Islandia actually exists. The message is as striking as the descriptions of the nation, and the novel is worth reading for both. I can only echo others in saying that this has been for me more worthwhile reading than any of the books I was made to read in my high school English classes.

This is one of those rare great novels to keep and treasure. Buy it -- its worth is far greater than the pittance it will cost you. Your room has been prepared for you...

Iv read many books and have had many experiences, his book has the aliblity to break you apart then build you back again into a greater person. I normlally only read complete fantasy and sci fy (moorcock, tolkien...) but this book was problebly one of the greatest ever. you could read it in a week or in a mounth. its intricate plot twistes your mind to wish for one thing or another and makes you belive that it anything possible at times and makes you feel nothing but dispair at others. when a book can enslave your mood and your personality such as this one has it is truly a work of art. it can compelle you to dream in your normall sleep of this land and wish you were there. islandia desevres no critic and i have no problem reccomendin it to every human being alive.

I regularly recommend this book to people who are creating their own worlds, whether it be for writing purposes, gaming purposes, or simply a place to wander about.

While Wright's obsessive attention to details of geography, history, and daily life are not for everyone, it does make a nice change from those fantasy worlds which seem slapped together merely to be a holding-place for a particular plot. Islandia is something of a textbook on internal consistency, and is useful in providing examples of how to think about how your own created world might go about incorporating styles of art, architecture, government, dress, transport, etc. seamlessly.

The book will probably seem rather dry and pointless to those who have never had their own world, and therefore don't realize the exceptional effort and skill it takes to create something this three-dimensional. For those of us laboring over such questions as, "what would the fishing industry be like in my world?", Wright can be inspirational.

People who don't enjoy history will probably not like this book; people who couldn't get through the Silmarillion will never make it through this. Before the book was published, some hundreds of pages were removed because they contained nothing but minute landscape details or the abstract ponderings of various characters. One of the great charms of the book is the obvious interest Wright had in the place, as a place, and for no utilitarian reason - he did not, as far as I know, actually intend to publish the book.

It's a different sort of book. It's literary, scholarly, and intensely concerned with people as people, rather than as plot devices. You'll find the pace slow, but if you can turn off the part of your mind that says, "what happens next?" and just get to know the people and places of Islandia, you'll find a separate but coherent reality.

"_Islandia_, Austin Tappan Wright's haunting Utopian novel, easily slips into Islandia, the imagined country which is the setting for the book. Almost anyone who has read the novel would go to Islandia in a moment should it ever be located, so it is easy to see why those who write about the book often find themselves writing in amazement about the country and its creation instead. As an imaginary land, it is extraordinary... the lifetime creation of a remarkable man. But I do not think it is simply the beauty of the land and the detail in which it is known and described by its creator that makes the novel so powerful. The novel is far more than a vision of Utopia, however appealing, being I think both a Bildungsroman, a novel of individual growth, intertwined with an adventure and the embodiment of great wisdom in ways of living, both individually and as a society. It is a marvelously subtle, poetic novel, and one can read many passages with great pleasure for the beauty of the descriptions or for the human insights alone.

Where did it begin? In Austin Wright's childhood and family surely... but also in the Cape Cod saltmarshes and the New England coast; in the White Mountains and the far north of Maine; in turn of the century Cambridge and Boston; in the Harvard classrooms of William James and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler; in the law offices and at-home afternoons of Justice Louis Brandeis; in Oxford and in travels through Europe; in Berkeley, then the center of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Northern California... for the novel is a distillation of all of these into a creation that stays on the mind and changes the reader long after the book is read. In it you may find traces of Thoreau and Emerson, of the pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement, of small Italian cities and the Berkeley Hillside Club, of Brandeis's views on life and society, of James's psychology and philosophy, of Shaler's views on man and nature, and perhaps of every experience of Wright's varied life. There are strong and independent women, written of with wonderful understanding and sympathy; there are deep insights into human nature and the nature of love; there are statesmen and political intrigue; most strikingly, there is a way of life both beautiful and practical, one that has changed more than one real life.

By all accounts, Austin Tappan Wright was a brilliant, erudite, and charming man, far from the dry academic lawyer one might expect. Some writers have suggested that Islandia was his retreat from a stressful life, a reaction to Puritan Cambridge. but reading of Harvard and Cambridge at the turn of the century and of the Berkeley community in the teens and twenties, I cannot help but feel what extraordinary people and surroundings they must have offered him. I am inclined to see Islandia not as a retreat from reality, but as an imaginative distillation of Wright's world; _Islandia_ not as a utopian novel, but as a poetic embodiment of a philosophy of life as well as a fascinating story."