Growing a Soul with Island of the World

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] almost called this a “review,” but it seems inappropriate to review a book like Island of the World. It’s be like reviewing a biography, something else that makes me uncomfortable. How could I review someone’s life? While technically fiction, Island of the World is most certainly the story of a life.

I thought it’d take me many months to finish this 800-page brick of a book, but my recent illness has given me time for reading {and sleeping}, and also no energy for anything else. Last Thursday, I only read or slept. I didn’t even really eat.

Or maybe I did eat. I ate this book. And it nourished me internally — my soul grew, I think.

While I highly recommend this book — it is beautifully and poetically written — still, I must warn you. The life of the main character, Josip Lasta, is tragic. I can’t even think of a word strong enough — the things that happened to him are proof that evil is alive and well in the world.

See me talking about him as if he were real?

Reading the book was a joy, but it was also pain. It was beautiful, yet I was unmade by it on more than one occasion. If you plan to read it, make sure you’re in a place in life where you can handle it.

I wish we had time to trace some of the themes I found in its pages — aging and what it means to grow up and grow old is a big one. Birth and rebirth. Faith and forgiveness in the fact of the most severe atrocities. The power of culture — real culture — to change the world. Love and self-sacrifice. Poetry and what it means to be a poet. How to be human. How to live well after tragedy and trauma. Even how to die well.

Or, we could step back and talk about the power of literature to teach empathy. There’s research saying it does, you know. As a teenager in the 90s, I remember hearing awful things about the former Yugoslavia.. I knew even then that to be “Balkanized” was a terrible thing. But I never felt anything. The evening news isn’t really the place to grow the affections.

But this book found me weeping at yet another incidence of Communism — and the Statist materialist ideologies in general — destroying a people, heart and soul. I care more about the Balkans than I ever did before.

Of course, we could step back even further and draw some parallel lines. We Americans tend to think we’re so protected from these things because we live in a democracy — which we’d be wise to remember is actually a republic. But what if the chests of our culture are more empty than we’d care to admit and our cultural gas tank is running on empty?

What if, for example, an empty suit with no moral compass were, say, the Republican Party’s front runner*?

Everyone always forgets that Hitler was democratically elected.

So. If you’re brave enough, read this book. And while I talked about themes, please don’t go read it analytically. Bathe in it — let it wash over you. Like all good art — and this is very good art — it’s work taking in as a whole.

*I wrote that before the results of the Iowa caucus.