Yet such a description does no more justice to The Island of Second Sight than our attempt to summarize the book’s contents. Why should today’s readers reach for Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Melville’s Moby-Dick, or Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum? These works offer their readers perennial themes of human experience, in eternally new variants and at the highest linguistic level. And this is exactly what happens in Thelen’s work. His topics are:
Freedom and Dependency
Freedom is our hero Vigoleis’ main concern. One of the final sentences in the book is this: “Our destination: freedom.” Vigoleis was unwilling to submit either to the authority of the Hotel Majorica or to that of the Nazis. His freedom was more valuable to him than his own life.
Success and Failure
Vigoleis constantly brags about his own incompetence. His origins aren’t worth writing memoirs about; he has no talent for handling money; he is incapable of acting in his own interest; and he doesn’t shy away from presenting a discussion about whether or not he is a genuine writer. In a brief but very impressive passage, he reports his totally futile attempt at giving a speech at his parents’ silver wedding anniversary. For Vigoleis, whose ambition is to become a storyteller, this episode remains in his memory as a bitter defeat.
Love and Hatred
While telling us about Pilar and Zwingli as a couple, Thelen shows us how love can turn into hatred. But there is also Beatrice and Vigoleis, whose love affair, while much less spectacular, is much more firmly rooted. Thelen is also keen to present different kinds of love, like the love that can exist between siblings (Beatrice and Zwingli), and between parents and children (Pilar and Julietta).
Idealism and Materialism
This important theme, which Cervantes exhibited in such grandiose fashion in his Don Quixote, is present throughout Thelen’s Island. Again and again he matches up his idealistic hero Vigoleis against materialistic antagonists who, for the most part, get the better of him: Adele Gerstenberg, Silberstern, the beggar Porfirio, and — to a certain extent — Zwingli. In the process, Thelen shows us how closely linked idealism is to humanism.
What is truly unique, however — and what launched the book’s Lower Rhenish author into the highest ranks of world literature — is the linguistic mastery that Thelen displays throughout the work’s many pages.
Thelen set off an unprecedented display of linguistic fireworks with the aid of a vocabulary that must have been the hugest in all of German literature. The critic Eckart Henscheid, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1994, referred to him as a “full-to-bursting narrator.”
Thelen the storyteller stepped forth as a force of nature, taking the fullest advantage of the cornucopia that is the German language, and of his own ability to master this language. The years he spent in foreign climes — and his familiarity with six different languages — were of great benefit for him. In response to a questionnaire in the 1960s, he explained that he had never once felt “banished” into a foreign language. “On the contrary,” he continued, “it was when I was on foreign soil, constantly surrounded by the sounds of a foreign tongue, that I began to take full possession of my own language.” He also developed an early interest in archaic and technical language, and he collected dictionaries. The largest compendium of German vocabulary by far, the German Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm, became his constant companion.
All this, plus his work as a translator, enriched Thelen’s language in impressive fashion. By comparing words, sentences, and idioms; by altering them; and by shaping new combinations, he created a multiplicity of new coinages. In this verbal circus, Thelen was the juggler, clown, and trapeze artist, all at once. As such, he performed a highly important service to German, the language of his birth. To quote Jean Paul, another brilliant German novelist, he “loosened its tongue.”
But what was Thelen’s life like before the Island was written — before a plan for the book even existed? The fifteen years that passed between his stay on Mallorca and the writing of the book went by both dramatically and calmly.
After their escape from the Spanish Falangists and the German National Socialists on Mallorca in 1936, Thelen and his wife passed through France and arrived in Switzerland, Beatrice’s homeland. Following a stay in Auressio (Canton Ticino), they planned a further escape to Portugal. From 1937 to 1947, Teixeira de Pascoaes sheltered them at his vineyard estate near Amarante in northern Portugal, protecting them from the grasp of the Nazis. During this time, Thelen worked on his translation of works by Pascoaes. Using contacts with the Dutch publishing house of Meulenhoff, which published the Dutch translations of Pascoaes, Thelen moved to Amsterdam in 1947. Here he found himself among writers and publishers, and he began to tell his stories about Mallorca.
One of his fascinated listeners was Geert van Oorschot, the Amsterdam publisher who published the Island in 1953. Thelen scholars originally assumed that van Oorschot was the first to encourage the writing of the book, but a letter written by Thelen on December 1, 1942 reveals that the publisher Meulenhoff had actually urged him to write a book of memoirs a good ten years earlier. What follows is a complete account, unavailable until now, of the correspondence between Thelen and the Düsseldorf publisher Peter Diederichs, and between Thelen and his family, insofar as it bears upon the writing of the Island.
In December, 1942, Thelen wrote to his mother:
My Dutch publisher has asked me in his most recent letter to write a book of travel impressions for his publishing house — without fancy notions of a “book”—just chatting on about my odd adventures, especially in Spain, meeting famous people, etc. A German publisher, in fact my own publisher, is likewise eager to produce such a book, so now I’ll have to decide whether to write it in Dutch or in German. Certain things come to me more easily in Dutch, but I can handle other things better using my mother tongue.
The German-language publisher he mentions was Rascher in Zurich, who published Thelen’s translations of Pascoaes. Almost a decade will now pass before Thelen begins writing his recollections. On May 8, 1951, he writes to his family in mock-officialese that on the previous day he has signed a contract with Geert van Oorschot:
The undersigned wishes to add that yesterday he concluded a contract with a publisher situated in said municipality of Amsterdam, for the purpose of securing the publishing rights for a book, yet to be written, which is to placed on the market in a Dutch version on 15 February, 1952 bearing the title “From the Applied Recollections of Vigoleis,” a novel by a. v. thelen. Now he must get a move on if he intends to produce text with his pen by the contracted deadline.
Van Oorschot, who was enthusiastic about the Mallorca tales that Thelen delivered in person, had been encouraging him to write down his experiences, and he had finally succeeded. At this time, the author and his publisher assumed that the work would be written in Dutch.