Albert Vigoleis Thelen has a narrative style that is variously farcical, byzantine and philosophical, and a sense of humor that makes light of countless catastrophes. A masterpiece of world literature

Albert Vigoleis Thelen, The Island of Second Sight, Trans. by Donald O. White, Overlook Press, 2012. [1953.]

Based on the author's own experiences in the 1930's on Mallorca in the years just prior to the Spanish Civil War, Vigoleis and Beatrice, pursued by Nazis and Francoists, embark on a series of unpredictable and surreal adventures in order to survive. The story is picaresque, the style ironic. the writing is rich, intense and entirely original.

Available for the first time in English, The Island of Second Sight is a masterpiece of world literature, first published in Germany in 1953 and hailed by Thomas Mann as "one of the greatest books of the twentieth century." Set on Mallorca in the 1930s in the years leading up to World War II, it is the fictionalized account of the time spent there by author--writing as Vigoleis, his alter-ego--and his wife, Beatrice, lured to the island by Beatrice’s dying brother, who, as it turns out not dying at all but broke and ensnared by the local prostitute.

Pursued by both the Nazis and Spanish Francoists, Vigoleis and Beatrice embark on a series of the most unpredictable and surreal adventures in order to survive. Low on money, the couple seeks shelter in a brothel for the military, serves as tour guides to groups of German tourists, and befriends such literary figures Robert Graves and Harry Kessler, as well as the local community of smugglers, aristocrats, and exiled German Jews. Vigoleis with his inventor hat on even creates a self-inflating brassiere. Then the Spanish Civil War erupts, presenting new challenges to their escape plan. Throughout, Vigoleis is an irresistibly engaging narrator; by turns amusing, erudite, naughty, and always utterly entertaining.
Drawing comparisons to Don Quixote and The Man Without Qualities, The Island of Second Sight is a novel of astonishing and singular richness of language and purpose; the story is picaresque, the voice ironic, the detail often hilarious, yet it is a work of profound seriousness, with an anti-war, anti-fascist, humanistic attitude at its core. With a style ranging from the philosophical to the grotesque, the colloquial to the arcane, The Island of Second Sight is a literary tour de force.

A vast novel—if novel it is—of the tangled lives of anti-Nazi Germans on the Spanish island of Majorca in the years leading up to World War II.

Some of those Germans were communists, others Jews; all were destined to be denounced, and many killed, when Franco’s soldiers finished their fascist revolution with the help of the Third Reich. That’s a grim matter of history, but Thelen (1903–1989) is anything but grim for much of this book, which was published in Germany in 1953 and has enjoyed a somewhat uneasy stance as a classic ever since—somewhat uneasy, that is, because it deals with matters that many Germans of the time would have just as soon forgotten. Even on dark matters, though, Thelen squeezes in unlikely jokes “A Spaniard who is ready to shoot today instead of tomorrow—how very odd!” he exclaims. Or rather, his alter ego, named Vigoleis and married, as was Thelen, to a woman named Beatrice, exclaims. To call this a roman à clef is to risk making too much of the connection between the author’s life and that of his protagonist, though one wonders whether this book is fictional in the same sense that Kenneth Rexroth’s An Autobiographical Novel is fiction—that is to say, not much at all. Whatever the case, Vigoleis is a sharp-eyed observer of his fellow Germans, both those on the island and those left far back home in the untender hands of Herr Hitler. Vigoleis may wish for detachment—he describes early on his “congenital aversion to contact with the external world”—but he becomes the unlikely center of a wheel whose spokes are both Spanish and German, and he is expected to perform miracles on behalf of all concerned. Of one clergy-hating Majorcan who asks him to invent a gallows that could humanely kill a priest “in a single stroke,” he notes, “I referred him to my fellow countrymen in the Third Reich, who were now the experts in mass executions.” Fortunately, Vigoleis—like Thelen in real life—manages to get away before he himself is the subject of an execution, leaving behind his beloved island, not quite a paradise but not quite a slaughterhouse, foreboding imagery notwithstanding.
Worthy of a place alongside On the Marble Cliffs, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Death of Virgil and other modernist German masterworks; a superb, sometimes troubling work of postwar fiction, deserving the widest possible audience. - Kirkus Reviews

"A charming if exhausting blend of cultural self-examination and picaresque adventure…Even when the author-narrator’s observations prove overwhelming, his cultural insights, historical laments, literary references, and abundant wit make this first English translation (by Amherst professor White) and the book itself a literary achievement." - Publishers Weekly

"[A] brilliant novel…Readers will thank a gifted translator for finally making this masterpiece--acclaimed by Thomas Mann--available to English-speakers." - Booklist

All of the people in this book are alive or were at one time,” begins Albert Thelen’s foreword to The Island of Second Sight. However, they “appear subject to greater or lesser degrees of personal disjuncture, similarly the sequence of events has undergone chronological rearrangements that can even involve the obliteration of all sense of time. In case of doubt, let truth be told.” This is a book, then, with a troubled relationship to reality and an untroubled one to truth. That is, one that claims the ultimate authority of the storyteller.
Just as in his own life, the author’s alter-ego Vigoleis arrives on the island of Mallorca in 1931 with his wife Beatrice, and the pair flee the increasingly inhospitable political climate in 1936. The degree to which the intervening five years hew to Thelen’s biography is debatable; as is the book’s position in the cannon. Lauded as one of the great works of twentieth century literature, The Island of Second Sight is not only under-appreciated abroad (it was first translated into English 57 years after its original publication), but also at home, where its status is rather that of a cult classic, absurd for a book of its stature.
Vigoleis and Beatrice travel to Mallorca because they believe that Beatrice’s brother Zwingli is dying there. Instead they find that he’s been incapacitated by the unstoppable sexual powers of Pilar, a particularly beautiful Spanish prostitute. Thus begins the Vigoleis’s long engagement with putas, whom he greets with the same shoulder-shrugging cheer as the rest of the turpitude and degeneration he encounters on the island, as well as in his own mind: “The philosopher Scheler had been right after all, when he responded to the Archbishop of Cologne, who had accused him of unvirtuous conduct, by asking His Eminence if he had ever seen a signpost that had ever gone in the direction it pointed to.”
Before Vigoleis, too, succumbs to Pilar, she mercifully kicks the couple out and they drift from one absurd lodging and low-paid occupation to the next, two bohemians at the mercy of fortune, never far removed from the moans and wails of the cathouse. A growing gaggle of locals, emigrés, and vacationers populate the story as Vigoleis and Beatrice settle into Mallorcan life. Therise of fascism paints a thickening black streak through the story, whose shadiness is otherwise derived from the more quotidian excesses of various human appetites and failings.
In other reviews, you’ll read about Thelen’s quick-witted Nazi-mocking, including one magisterial scene in which Vigoleis, working as a tour guide (called a “Führer” in German, literally a “leader”) deludes and delights a gaggle of German tourists by narrating their tour with lies that aggrandize the Teutonic tradition. The Island of Second Sight is also praised for its numerous literary allusions, as well as for the diverse intellectuals of the day that Vigoleis comes into contact with and lampoons.
None of these are the reason that The Island of Second Sight should win the Best Translated Book Award 2013. What does make it worthy of the prize is its sheer linguistic fecundity and the contribution it makes to the tradition of narrative. Vigoleis is one of the true great incarnations of the storyteller. He’s very nearly a shape-shifter, and he employs his art not only on rightist tourists, but also lonely heiresses, local functionaries, and first and foremost on the reader.
Vigoleis is so garrulous, clever, and original that you will willingly follow him down any cow-path he cares to tread. Which is every path that offers itself. At 736 pages, discursion is the novel’s mode, and it is hard to say what is plot and what is tangent. Multiple, extended scenes dedicated to the attempted and ultimately counterfeited nonconsensual consummation of the miscegenational union of a purebred Pekinese and a lapdog of impure lineage? Journeys back into childhood, into the Middle Ages? The story of the joke that cost Unamuno his life? Ever-deepening reflections on the failings of Catholicism? On the writings of Teixeira de Pascoaes, whose writings Thelen translated from the Portuguese in real life? On the philosophical significance of the donkey? Why not.
Perhaps even more interesting are the recursive discursions, that is, the ones that themselves reflect on the nature of narrative. Thelen refers to Vigoleis in the third person, except when he doesn’t, for example, when pulling back to comment on his own storytelling prowess, which hazily bleeds into Vigoleis’s as we reenter the stream of the plot. Rumor, translation, transcription, letter writing, note-taking, testifying, confessing, lying for personal gain, lying for sport—every manner in which a story can be transmuted and transmitted has its day in The Island of Second Sight.
The text is as rife with neologisms as archaisms, rhetorical devices as well as low puns, enriched by a sprinkling of words from the six languages Thelen spoke. The book is a lexicographical treasure that particularly delights in the description of all that is base. Beatrice’s debauched brother Zwingli is even the editor of a poly-lingual dictionary of obscenities, to which Vigoleis is naturally a helpful contributor.
That translator Donald White has managed to capture the book’s riotous linguistic profusion is a small miracle. Let me cite one of the innumerable jewels that dot the novel: Vigoleis describes a period of uncharacteristic domestic harmony: “Wherever one looked, it was a scene of peace and concord. It was as if the word puta had been struck from our dictionary.” A paragraph later, Don Darío, fellow lodger and exploiter of Vigoleis’s half-baked business ideas, disrupts this rare bliss. Why? “. . . it was only an American millionaire who had enraged my putative business partner.” Of course, if harmony is puta-free, then an angry man is putative.
This is a book whose form echoes the copiousness of the chaotic, shifting social order it depicts. Filthy, generous, good-natured, manipulative, The Island of Second Sight is an utterly, amply, completely human book, and that is why it deserves to win the BTBA. - Amanda DeMarco
 
It’s somewhat intimidating to review a book already described by Thomas Mann as “one of the greatest” of the 20th century — or so its publisher claims. It also seems odd that, despite Mann’s blessing, Albert Vigoleis Thelen’s picaresque romp, “The Island of Second Sight,” only recently became available in English — published in Britain in 2010, 57 years after its first appearance in German. But welcome it is. Without presuming to echo Mann, this is one of the most unusual and entertaining books I have ever read.
The cover announces that it’s a novel, although a subtitle inside (“From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis”) clearly identifies it as a memoir, specifically of the time Thelen and his Swiss wife, Beatrice, spent in Majorca between 1931 and 1936. Later German editions carry lengthy corrections, included in Donald O. White’s excellent translation, that suggest its author valued accuracy. That said, the narrator is not Thelen but his alter ego, Vigoleis, a nickname he earned at college.
Still, why should we care about a destitute German writer living on a Mediterranean island many decades ago? Because he has a narrative style that is variously farcical, byzantine and philosophical, and a sense of humor that makes light of countless catastrophes. Vigoleis also provides droll portraits — or are they caricatures? — of the friends, conspirators, eccentrics and enemies encountered on this madcap journey. And in its 730 pages, the book has ample room for digressions about life before and after Majorca. (Thelen died, at the age of 85, in 1989.)
Politics add darker variables. Then, as now, the island was much loved by German expatriates, retirees and tourists. And well before Hitler came to power in 1933, his shadow already divided its German community. At the same time, shortly before Thelen and Beatrice reached Majorca in 1931, the Spanish Republic replaced the monarchy. Right-wing agitation followed until General Franco plunged Spain into civil war in 1936. By then, things were too hot for Thelen and Beatrice. With both Nazis and fascists on their heels, they fled Majorca.
But five years earlier, their lives were shaped more by happenstance. Alerted by a cable from Beatrice’s brother in Majorca that reads, “Am dying. Zwingli,” they set off on a mission of mercy only to discover that Zwingli’s actual problem is a former prostitute with a furious sexual appetite who has left him a physical wreck. Zwingli insists that Vigoleis and Beatrice move in with him and his captor, the beautiful Pilar. Foolishly, they agree.
Beatrice’s savings are soon exhausted by Zwingli’s numerous creditors, who, upon discovering his sister’s loyal generosity, come banging on his door. More disturbing, however, is the flighty Pilar, who soon notices Vigoleis’s burning lust for her. One day, when they’re alone in Zwingli’s apartment, she lures our ardent narrator to her bedroom: “I was still attempting to strip away the last mundane trappings from my goddess, when the Divinity Herself bent down, grasped her right stocking and drew forth a dagger.” He panics. “She will make love to you,” he tells himself, “and then plunge the blade up to the hilt between your ribs.” After briefly wondering if there could be “a more beautiful death for a melancholy poet­aster,” he bolts. Only later, after Zwingli is treated for syphilis, does Vigoleis realize what else he has escaped.
In due course, having run out of money, Vigoleis and Beatrice are thrown out by Pilar and move into a crumbling guesthouse run by “a half-anarchistic, semi-­Catholic count” and peopled by an exiled Viennese actress, a sickly Dutch plantation owner, a disenchanted Prussian Army officer, assorted anarchists and a cook who keeps a pipe in her cleavage. Soon, unable to pay the rent, they find a roofless room in a brothel that services bullfighters and opium smugglers. When the rainy season floods their room, they find an apartment they cannot afford to furnish.
Things look up when they are hired to guide German day-trippers from their cruise ships to scenic points around the island. As it happens, Vigoleis, an outspoken anti-Nazi, dislikes most Germans and knows little about Majorca. But he is hungry, so he bites his tongue and invents his patter, not least at an abandoned monastery where Chopin and his mistress George Sand spent a miserable winter a century earlier. When some of his charges complain about the cafe they’ve been assigned to patronize at lunchtime, he explains: “Well, you see, in this house and on this balcony, Cervantes wrote his ‘Don Quixote,’ in 95 nights by the light of an oil wick. During the day he slept, as many writers do. This is sacred ground. Surely I need say no more.” Duly reprimanded, the Germans silently clean their plates.
Meanwhile, still more unlikely characters join the parade: the poet Robert Graves, whose book “I, Claudius” Vigoleis claims to have typed; Count Harry Kess­ler, an exiled German diplomat, who dictates his memoirs to Vigoleis; a fugitive Honduran general plotting a revolution back home; an American millionairess who believes Christian Science has cured her diseased kidney; a sex-crazed German Jewish. . . . Well, you get the idea.
When Franco launches his revolution in July 1936, Vigoleis and Beatrice are staying outside Palma, the island’s capital, initially unaware that the Franquistas are hunting down leftists and anarchists. Weeks later, Vigoleis learns he is on a death list and is presumed to have been murdered. Clearly it is time to leave.
To do so, Vigoleis needs his passport stamped by the Third Reich’s consul, who receives him with the words, “You? Haven’t you been shot?” Somehow Vigoleis gets his way. And, days later, with Beatrice by his side, he steps aboard a British destroyer evacuating foreigners. He is hiding 200 letters to be posted abroad and, by good fortune, the customs officer has overslept. Thanks, Vigoleis notes, to “some insatiable Spanish whore.”  - Alan Riding

You’re someone who loves books, and you’re pretty sure you’re aware of all the modern masterpieces. But what if someone told you that you’ve never heard of “one of the greatest books of the twentieth century”? This is what Thomas Mann called Albert Vigoleis Thelen’s The Island of Second Sight—and you’ve probably never heard of it. You know a book critic is uninspired and unoriginal when they call a book “a tour-de-force,” but, for once, the over-used term is actually appropriate here. The Island of Second Sight is an 800-page tour-de-force, first published in 1953 and an international bestseller for decades. It is only now available to American readers for the first time, thanks to Peter Mayer and The Overlook Press.
Just as Melville’s Moby-Dick takes us on an ocean adventure, Dante’s Inferno down into the levels of hell, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote on a mad chivalric escapade, Thelen’s The Island of Second Sight whisks readers away to the Spanish island of Mallorca, where everything seems to revolve around sex, violence, and religion. More than any of the above mentioned masterpieces, The Island of Second Sight has most often been compared to the Quixote, and with good reason, too, for just as Cervantes’ man of La Mancha finds himself in one difficult situation after another, so too does Thelen’s alter-ego blunder around Mallorca from one comic yet life-threatening situation to the next.
The Island of Second Sight is a thinly fictionalized autobiography of Thelen’s time living on Mallorca with his wife Beatrice during the 1930s; the narrator is a German writer named Vigoleis Thelen, and his Swiss wife is named Beatrice (with the numerous references to Dante, one would think Beatrice would be a symbolic name, but not so). In the beginning of the book, the couple receives two telegrams: Beatrice’s mother is sick in Switzerland, and her brother Zwingli writes, “Am dying.” The couple chooses to help the brother, who lives on Mallorca. Soon after arriving on the island, they quickly find out Zwingli is alive and well; he’s at the sexual mercy of a Spanish seductress named Pilar, and only “dying” in the Shakespearean sense. From here, the quixotic adventure begins.
The locals of Palma refer to Zwingli as Don Helvecio (an allusion to the Swiss nation’s official name of Confederation Helvetic), as he is the proprietor of a prostitution ring. Thelen and Beatrice move into Zwingli’s home, which they share with the fiery Pilar, and her nymphet daughter, Juiletta, who likes to make men pant by dancing in the street. Thelen lusts for both Pilar and Julietta, and the book looks like it will take a Lolita-ish turn, but before he can consummate his desire, Pilar throws Thelen and Beatrice out. By then, their money has been eaten by Zwingli’s debts, and Thelen’s expected payments from German film companies and publishing houses never come through. They subsequently live like vagabonds, first moving to a boarding house run by a Catholic Anarchist, and then to a Cloister-cum-brothel patronized by bullfighters. Forced by their sudden poverty to go on a “grape diet” and live in abject conditions—their room has no roof, and moans of pleasure are heard throughout the night—the couple turn their thoughts to suicide.
Yet before they can throw themselves into the ocean, something comes up; new friends offer opportunities to live another day. As the chapters roll on, Beatrice and Thelen earn their living as language teachers, tour guides, translators, interpreters, and cultural administrators. They begin to like Spain better than their home countries, but then it’s 1933 and everything changes. With Hitler and the Nazi’s rise to power, German refugees arrive to Mallorca in droves, with German spies not far behind, turning the island into an unofficial German colony. An outspoken critic of the Hitler and all the “monkeys” who follow him, Thelen quickly catches the eye of Nazi officials and becomes persecuted, having his property confiscated and his life threatened.
Much of the book is a satire on the Third Reich and the insanity that has taken hold of Thelen’s countrymen, but rather than get nasty with easy, sweeping condemnations of political evil, the author portrays the much more realistic situation of how fascism manipulates democracy and seduces otherwise rational and educated people:
In the Bay of Palma a German steamer lay at anchor, a ship of the Woermann Line. But instead of letting loose a horde of tourists on the island, this ship had arrived at Mallorca with the special mission of luring people on board—German people. To be exact, all the Germans living here who were of an age to vote. The German colony was expected to say “Yes!” to the Fuhrer in a secret ballot. As on a trip down the Rhine, a brass band on board presented the opportunity to link elbows, sing patriotic songs, and shed a nostalgic tear. Plus, as a personal reward from the Fuhrer for voting “Yes,” you’d receive two sandwiches smeared with lard, beer on tap, and all the mustard you wanted. In order to place the voting process under the sovereignty of the Third Reich, the voters had to be taken out beyond the legal limits of the Spanish waters. This meant a delightful Mediterranean excursion with kit and caboodle.
Just when the Nazis issue an order for the execution of Thelen and Beatrice, there is “a sudden regression to the Middle Ages”—the Spanish Civil War breaks out and the drama continues, with Mallorca being the scene of some of the war’s most dreadful carnage.
The book seems to go on and on as the plot unravels through the absurd history of the early twentieth century, but what makes The Island of Second Sight a masterpiece is Thelen’s self-described “Cactus style” of writing: “it formed branches and offshoots at random, like a cactus with its urge to sprout buds just where you would never expect them.” The book is firmly modern, with Thelen overtly using meta-fictional narration techniques, guiding the reader through his labyrinth: “I’ll give you due warning when the Fuhrer’s local henchman rises to power, so that you’ll know that he’s after you, too. And a few years after that, when the Caudillo starts shooting and once again you start getting hot feet, you’ll want to be right there along with the rest of us.”
Thelen’s sentences are powered by his inexhaustible wit, with nearly every paragraph containing a maxim or pun. Irony itself designs the structure of Thelen’s prose. Frequent allusion to myth and epic reveal his vast knowledge of various traditions. With his tongue always planted in cheek, Thelen shapes various situations into a life lesson, stamping it with an aphorism:
“Beastliness has stuck to mankind ever since we emerged from the primeval slime, and that’s why nearly all of us go right along whenever we get the call to don a snappy uniform.”
“Posthumous fame is always more lucrative than fame itself.”
“No matter how firmly rooted in his own personality a man might be, he could still be shaken into oddball behavior by two types of situations: marriage and exile.”
“The teachers of theology had no sense whatever of religion. Instead, they were the mathematical purveyors of dogmatic theorems into which they inserted statements about God. They derived the cubic root of God, and raised God to the desired power—which is to say, they held on a leash the entity they referred to as their Creator.”
“It’s an amazing thing about any war, that after committing a few atrocities, a human being can regress to the womb of primeval atrocity.”
Thelen’s aphorisms are too numerous to include, but anyone will love his opinion of filling out tax forms: “Why all this gibberish that a normal human being cannot understand without crib notes? For me, plumbing the depths of a poem is child’s play compared to puzzling out a tax form.”
Like with the Quixote, these delightful nuggets of Thelen’s wit and wisdom make reading The Island of Second Sight a breeze, even though the book is gargantuan. - Randy Rosenthal