From John Fowles’s deep weirdness to Yōko Ogawa’s amnesiac dystopia, these books could put you off beach holidays for ever
I’ve lived and worked on islands and I’ve holidayed on islands and nothing sinister has ever befallen me. That’s because, of course, in reality islands are often very nice., the smaller the hotter. It doesn’t matter if the island in question is lush and tropical or a hunk of rock in an Austrian lake. When there’s nowhere to go but the shore and back and the shore and back, everything is familiar and familiarity breeds resentment.
And if you’re the visitor? That’s also not great. You either end up contemplating the gulf between your dream and reality or – and this is when things really go off the deep end – embracing delusion and living deliriously removed from the mainland of reality. A young man leaves his bucolic home to seek out his uncle, who lives on an isolated Alpine lake island. Once the ferryman departs, his uncle instructs him to drown his beloved Pomeranian if he wants to enter the estate. Otherwise, he’s free to sleep on the rocky ground outside, with nothing to eat or drink and only the towering mountains for company. There’s no way off the island. The mist is rising.
No, this book doesn’t physically take place on a small island. But the things that go horribly wrong – hilariously, with the grimacing mania of a silent film – are due to the fact that our narrator decides to live a life modelled on Treasure Island’s Jim Hawkins.
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