The Island of Second Sight - Softcover

Albert Vigoleis Thelen (1903-1989) was a German writer and translator.

*Starred Review* On this balcony, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. With a bit of mischievously mendacious literary history, Vigo—the narrator-protagonist of this brilliant novel—gulls credulous German tourists. Based on the five difficult years that author Thelen and his wife, Beatrice, spent on Mallorca in the 1930s, this novel delivers the gritty texture of lived experience. But as Vigo recounts his (mis)adventures, readers realize that, like Cervantes’ visionary knight, Vigo sees things others do not. While living in a dirty Mallorcan bordello, Vigo transforms himself into a chivalric champion defending his beloved against threatening dragon-rats. Like Quixote assaulting windmill-giants, Vigo declares war against his Nazified German homeland—by buying an American typewriter rather than a German one. But Vigo’s quixotic crusade takes on a dangerously real edge when he uses his typewriter to denounce the führer. Yet, like Quixote escaping from a perilously enchanted castle, Vigo and his wife escape from an island descending into the maelstrom of civil war. To be sure, this modern Quixote wields a sardonic sense of humor quite lacking in his literary predecessor. But that humor finally becomes Vigo’s own imaginative weapon against an all-too-ugly reality. Readers will thank a gifted translator for finally making this masterpiece—acclaimed by Thomas Mann—available to English speakers. --Bryce Christensen