The Island of Second Sight

It is impossible to give a concise summary of this extraordinary novel that's been likened to Cervantes's Don Quixote, not only because of its scale, but also because of its baroque beauty. It is uniquely humorous, engrossingly contemptuous of the political climate before Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s, and an unrivalled linguistic masterpiece. It is totally unlike anything else, a tissue woven of many strands, full of irony and sarcasm and yet deeply human(istic) and erudite, and could easily be the funniest book ever written in German.

Thelen has by far the largest vocabulary of any German author (including Goethe, who normally takes the statistical lead), and as if that wasn't enough, he creates dozens of new words to convey particular nuances and shades of meaning or satire. Vigo/Vigoleis, the author's alter ego, a determined opponent of Hitler and his Nazi regime, and his multilingual wife (Beatrice from Basle) are urgently called to Majorca to the deathbed of Beatrice's brother (Zwingli, aka Don Helvecio). Only he isn't dying, as they discover when they arrive, but totally broke and sexually ensnared by a local prostitute who is making his life a misery. As a loving sister, Beatrice pays off his debts, and thus begins the unusual island adventures of the German-Swiss couple, their many struggles and encounters with the most bizarre collection of characters, indigenous and other, on Majorca. They are close to starvation some of the time, seek shelter in a remote farmhouse that acts as a brothel for the military while doubling up as a smuggler's den, but they are masters of the art of survival.

The novel was a huge bestseller in Germany, France, Spain and Holland after its first publication in 1953. But it took until 2008 to track down a brilliant English translation by a Amherst professor of German, Donald White, who had completed the work as a labour of love over 20 years. This translation then went on to win the 2013 PEN Best Translation award following Galileo's publication of the novel, which now reissues the book in a smaller format and with an afterword by Jurgen Putz, a leading expert on Thelen's writing.