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nwhyte's review against another edition
4.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3008508.html
It's set in the first decade of the last century. Our protagonist has a bromance at Harvard with a scion of the ruling elite of Islandia, a mysterious country on a mysterious continent in the southern hemisphere (more likely the Atlantic than the Pacific, from the hints we are given). After graduation, he pulls some family political strings and gets sent there as the American Consul. And he falls in love, with several of the young women of Islandia, but most of all with the country itself, whose relaxed social and sexual attitudes are a stark contrast with the rather repressed American culture of the Gilded Age. It's a great work of world-building, with a series of romantic plots overlaid (and some politics, but really not all that much). The pace is fairly gentle, but I did find myself caught up in the story, especially the awkwardness of the narrator's relationships with the women of both Islandia and the USA. It's a long read, but worth it.
It's set in the first decade of the last century. Our protagonist has a bromance at Harvard with a scion of the ruling elite of Islandia, a mysterious country on a mysterious continent in the southern hemisphere (more likely the Atlantic than the Pacific, from the hints we are given). After graduation, he pulls some family political strings and gets sent there as the American Consul. And he falls in love, with several of the young women of Islandia, but most of all with the country itself, whose relaxed social and sexual attitudes are a stark contrast with the rather repressed American culture of the Gilded Age. It's a great work of world-building, with a series of romantic plots overlaid (and some politics, but really not all that much). The pace is fairly gentle, but I did find myself caught up in the story, especially the awkwardness of the narrator's relationships with the women of both Islandia and the USA. It's a long read, but worth it.
emilythesmelly's review against another edition
2.0
I have to DNF this at 63% because it's been over a year since I've read any and I have no motivation to ever pick it up again. I'm just being honest. I'm never reading that final 400 pages.
I started reading because Anne McCaffrey cited this book as foundational for her in her journey into writing fantasy literature.
Make no mistake: this is not fantasy.
Technically, it is, but only technically. It's about an Earth that is exactly like ours, except there's another continent on it. Nothing even a little supernatural going on.
There's not nothing of value in this book. Wright did The Worldbuilding in a way that would make Tolkein proud. Islandia is fully realized and detailed. I will not deny that. There are also really interesting critiques of colonialism, nuances of love and lust, investigations of home and belonging and family. There are some good and interesting points made by and in this book for sure.
But the narrator is insufferable. John Lang is at once a Nice Guy, a softboy, and a fuckboy. These interesting and progressive ideas almost never come from him, but are rebutted and argued by him. His narrative arc is that he wants to have sex (which by the way is a bad motivation for a book), and he does that ~60% through, so what is supposed to keep me as a reader going? And while The Worldbuilding is impressive, it's incredibly dull. It's overdone, and I just wanted it to be over.
I had to give up on it. Its merits were bogged down and suffocated by its annoying aspects, and I'm finally ready to admit that I'm done. A study of how to and not to create a fantastical world, all in one.
I started reading because Anne McCaffrey cited this book as foundational for her in her journey into writing fantasy literature.
Make no mistake: this is not fantasy.
Technically, it is, but only technically. It's about an Earth that is exactly like ours, except there's another continent on it. Nothing even a little supernatural going on.
There's not nothing of value in this book. Wright did The Worldbuilding in a way that would make Tolkein proud. Islandia is fully realized and detailed. I will not deny that. There are also really interesting critiques of colonialism, nuances of love and lust, investigations of home and belonging and family. There are some good and interesting points made by and in this book for sure.
But the narrator is insufferable. John Lang is at once a Nice Guy, a softboy, and a fuckboy. These interesting and progressive ideas almost never come from him, but are rebutted and argued by him. His narrative arc is that he wants to have sex (which by the way is a bad motivation for a book), and he does that ~60% through, so what is supposed to keep me as a reader going? And while The Worldbuilding is impressive, it's incredibly dull. It's overdone, and I just wanted it to be over.
I had to give up on it. Its merits were bogged down and suffocated by its annoying aspects, and I'm finally ready to admit that I'm done. A study of how to and not to create a fantastical world, all in one.
frankielovestonap's review
adventurous
emotional
informative
reflective
relaxing
tense
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
spoth's review
3.0
Written over most of a lifetime with no intent to publish, this book is surprisingly complex and well-structured. It was edited down to 1000 pages from 2000, and still definitely tends to ramble on - not a book for the impatient. Partly a leisurely exploration of a hypothetical land and society, partly about love, gender relations, civilization, and colonialism. Did I care for any of the characters? No, not really. Was I enthralled by the exotic landscape and atmosphere? No, not really. It's basically Europe with a few quirks, and a few cultural differences. But I can appreciate the thought and care that went into the society's design, and into character development.
expendablemudge's review
5.0
Well-loved books from my past
Rating: 5 very nostalgic stars out of five
The Book Report: John Lang, Harvard '10, meets Dorn...that's all, just Dorn, a red-skinned Islandian noble, during their college years. Lang likes the quiet, self-possessed man, and Dorn likes Lang's accepting nature. Friendship blossoms, Dorn spends holidays with Lang at his tart spinster aunt's farm doing hard labor and teaching Lang Islandian.
Graduation comes, Dorn goes, and Lang has no real idea what the hell to do with himself. Lang's rich businessman uncle suggests that Lang apply to be US Consul to Islandia, since he's one of the very few non-native speakers of the language. Islandia isn't a major power, isolated on the Karain semi-continent, south of Africa and projecting towards Antarctica. Its society has been closed for generations, as Japan's was, and like Japan, Islandia is now under great pressure to open itself up for trade with the Western world. Lang's uncle thinks that, since his nephew speaks the language and is already friends with one of the isolationist leaders (Dorn), he's got the “in” to work on opening the country up to American trade first. Strings are pulled, arrangements are made, a young lady-friend is left with promises to write often, and (150pp in) our story commences.
What a story! Lang and Dorn are, from the moment they see each other again, back to being the closest possible friends, despite their wide difference of opinion on the subject of trade and intercourse between their countries. Speaking of intercourse, Dorn's sister Dorna captures Lang's virginal fancy, plays with him, and then upon realizing Lang is falling for her for real, she tells him no...she's set to be queen. And she marries Alwin, the king. This will be important later.
Lang's job brings him more and more into conflict with his heart, as he comes to know and love with a fierce and befuddled passion the good and noble people, the beautiful and bounteous land, and the startlingly unrepressed and unreligious culture of Islandia. Lang ultimately finds himself in a position where he must decide between being himself, his full, awakened self, his Islandian self, and fight the invading armies seeking to subjugate Islandia, or being the US Consul.
Even though it means the US, in fact the whole world, will be forced out of Islandia again, even though it means the other Islandian girl he's fallen in love with (and lost that pesky virginity to), Hytha, will be lost to him forever, he fights with his friends for the country he loves, and he leaves it knowing he's done the only possible honorable and honest thing.
Back in the US, Mary, the young lady-friend he's corresponded with these years, and he take up again, and get married. Lang thinks, “oh well, I've had my fun, I've done the right thing” and settles into soul-killing ennui and horribly depressing severing from the world and the people he truly loves.
Remember Alwin the king marrying Lang's buddy's sister? Alwin, knowing Lang's actions and understanding Lang's love for Dorna, Islandia, and life lived in harmony with nature, grants Lang and his wife land and citizenship as thanks for Lang's battle service and his heart-gift to Alwin's family by marriage. Off go Lang and Mary! And what an adjustment it proves to be...never easy to remake yourself, and still less easy to do so for someone else's happiness...but, as in the best stories, Lang and Marya (as she's called now, all women's names ending in an “a”) struggle and goof up and make hideous blunders, and immerse themselves into their new, and beautiful, and deeply loved home.
My Review: Wright, a lawyer by trade, wrote Islandia over the course of decades. He filled notebooks and sketchpads, created histories and historians, plays and playwrights, a religion without a god, a full and vibrant and heart-hurtingly beautiful culture, and used Lang's entry into this rich and lively...I'd say living, but clearly it's not...ethos to explore the ways in which his fantasy world was superior to the early 20th century American culture he lived in.
After Wright died in a car crash in 1931, his Islandia was dormant until an accidental discovery by Mark Saxton, a young editor at Farrar and Rinehart (we now call them Farrar Straus and Giroux), led to the publication of some 1020 pages of the trove in 1942. The marketing stuff for the book touted the fact that, since you couldn't take your European vacation this year, you should go to Islandia!
It worked. Major bestseller. It was the Infinite Jest of the 1940s...whacking great block of a book that *everyone* had to have on the coffee table, but few people read all the way through.
I found a copy in the brand new Old Quarry branch of the Austin Public Library in 1973. The dust jacket was a topographical map with the title in lower case italic type, all of it in shades of ochre and brown. I picked it up, read a few lines, and was never the same boy again.
An honest and ethical culture! No stupid gawd-stories! Free love! People who felt so real to me, a world that was so beautifully complete, that I just *knew* I'd find it all someday.
I never have, but I've never entirely lost hope that I will. (Foolish old man to dream like that.)
In the intervening forty(ish) years, I've given away a dozen copies. I've read the book all the way through only twice, but have gone back to read parts so many times that the copy I had disintegrated. I haven't replaced it because I'm pondering whether to look for a decent copy of the 1942 edition...and dreading the likelihood that I simply can't hold the book in my painful hands anymore. It is a loss so painful that I dread making the experiment, and so do nothing. Some things it's better not to know.
Islandian culture is what a truly happy planet would follow. Islandian customs make sense, because they flow organically from the logical, happiness-seeking ethos that pervades Islandia. Now that I know, thanks to the marvelous book The Swerve, what Epicureanism is, I think I know now what Wright based his world-building on: What if a genuinely Epicurean people existed, and lived their lives and governed themselves, according to Epicurean principles?
There is an Islandian custom called tanrydoon. It means that, in the course of life, there are people one meets whose essential being is so in tune with our own, whose presence in our life is so necessary, that the person becomes a kind of family. A room in one's home is prepared. The room is designed to suit the tastes of the more-than-friend, the furnishings and the colors and the items in the room all relate to the person's family and achievements. The more-than-friend is brought to their new home place, and in true Islandian fashion, the existence of this space is taken as proof that the claims of tanrydoon are in place: One can never be barred from the home-place, one can never be so lost or so alone that the certainty of welcome and acceptance is withdrawn or abrogated without the most appalling provocation.
Dorn offers Lang tanrydoon. Lang has a home-place, a family claim, a harbor and haven...despite the fact that Dorn fights everything Lang's job stands for. It doesn't matter...Dorn loves Lang in the uniquely Islandian way described by the word linamia or powerful loving friendship, needs his friendship and his companionship, and makes him understand that his place among the Dorns is always his.
I thought then, and I think now, that this is the most beautiful, the most moving, the most fulfilling passage in the book, and a cultural notion that should be encouraged in our solipsistic, anomie-ridden place and time. How much less hatred there would be if such an idea was encouraged and enacted.
This book is, to me, what Lord of the Rings is to others: A vision of a complete world that, if the Universe was properly run, would be accessible to us mere mortal humans.
Rating: 5 very nostalgic stars out of five
The Book Report: John Lang, Harvard '10, meets Dorn...that's all, just Dorn, a red-skinned Islandian noble, during their college years. Lang likes the quiet, self-possessed man, and Dorn likes Lang's accepting nature. Friendship blossoms, Dorn spends holidays with Lang at his tart spinster aunt's farm doing hard labor and teaching Lang Islandian.
Graduation comes, Dorn goes, and Lang has no real idea what the hell to do with himself. Lang's rich businessman uncle suggests that Lang apply to be US Consul to Islandia, since he's one of the very few non-native speakers of the language. Islandia isn't a major power, isolated on the Karain semi-continent, south of Africa and projecting towards Antarctica. Its society has been closed for generations, as Japan's was, and like Japan, Islandia is now under great pressure to open itself up for trade with the Western world. Lang's uncle thinks that, since his nephew speaks the language and is already friends with one of the isolationist leaders (Dorn), he's got the “in” to work on opening the country up to American trade first. Strings are pulled, arrangements are made, a young lady-friend is left with promises to write often, and (150pp in) our story commences.
What a story! Lang and Dorn are, from the moment they see each other again, back to being the closest possible friends, despite their wide difference of opinion on the subject of trade and intercourse between their countries. Speaking of intercourse, Dorn's sister Dorna captures Lang's virginal fancy, plays with him, and then upon realizing Lang is falling for her for real, she tells him no...she's set to be queen. And she marries Alwin, the king. This will be important later.
Lang's job brings him more and more into conflict with his heart, as he comes to know and love with a fierce and befuddled passion the good and noble people, the beautiful and bounteous land, and the startlingly unrepressed and unreligious culture of Islandia. Lang ultimately finds himself in a position where he must decide between being himself, his full, awakened self, his Islandian self, and fight the invading armies seeking to subjugate Islandia, or being the US Consul.
Even though it means the US, in fact the whole world, will be forced out of Islandia again, even though it means the other Islandian girl he's fallen in love with (and lost that pesky virginity to), Hytha, will be lost to him forever, he fights with his friends for the country he loves, and he leaves it knowing he's done the only possible honorable and honest thing.
Back in the US, Mary, the young lady-friend he's corresponded with these years, and he take up again, and get married. Lang thinks, “oh well, I've had my fun, I've done the right thing” and settles into soul-killing ennui and horribly depressing severing from the world and the people he truly loves.
Remember Alwin the king marrying Lang's buddy's sister? Alwin, knowing Lang's actions and understanding Lang's love for Dorna, Islandia, and life lived in harmony with nature, grants Lang and his wife land and citizenship as thanks for Lang's battle service and his heart-gift to Alwin's family by marriage. Off go Lang and Mary! And what an adjustment it proves to be...never easy to remake yourself, and still less easy to do so for someone else's happiness...but, as in the best stories, Lang and Marya (as she's called now, all women's names ending in an “a”) struggle and goof up and make hideous blunders, and immerse themselves into their new, and beautiful, and deeply loved home.
My Review: Wright, a lawyer by trade, wrote Islandia over the course of decades. He filled notebooks and sketchpads, created histories and historians, plays and playwrights, a religion without a god, a full and vibrant and heart-hurtingly beautiful culture, and used Lang's entry into this rich and lively...I'd say living, but clearly it's not...ethos to explore the ways in which his fantasy world was superior to the early 20th century American culture he lived in.
After Wright died in a car crash in 1931, his Islandia was dormant until an accidental discovery by Mark Saxton, a young editor at Farrar and Rinehart (we now call them Farrar Straus and Giroux), led to the publication of some 1020 pages of the trove in 1942. The marketing stuff for the book touted the fact that, since you couldn't take your European vacation this year, you should go to Islandia!
It worked. Major bestseller. It was the Infinite Jest of the 1940s...whacking great block of a book that *everyone* had to have on the coffee table, but few people read all the way through.
I found a copy in the brand new Old Quarry branch of the Austin Public Library in 1973. The dust jacket was a topographical map with the title in lower case italic type, all of it in shades of ochre and brown. I picked it up, read a few lines, and was never the same boy again.
An honest and ethical culture! No stupid gawd-stories! Free love! People who felt so real to me, a world that was so beautifully complete, that I just *knew* I'd find it all someday.
I never have, but I've never entirely lost hope that I will. (Foolish old man to dream like that.)
In the intervening forty(ish) years, I've given away a dozen copies. I've read the book all the way through only twice, but have gone back to read parts so many times that the copy I had disintegrated. I haven't replaced it because I'm pondering whether to look for a decent copy of the 1942 edition...and dreading the likelihood that I simply can't hold the book in my painful hands anymore. It is a loss so painful that I dread making the experiment, and so do nothing. Some things it's better not to know.
Islandian culture is what a truly happy planet would follow. Islandian customs make sense, because they flow organically from the logical, happiness-seeking ethos that pervades Islandia. Now that I know, thanks to the marvelous book The Swerve, what Epicureanism is, I think I know now what Wright based his world-building on: What if a genuinely Epicurean people existed, and lived their lives and governed themselves, according to Epicurean principles?
There is an Islandian custom called tanrydoon. It means that, in the course of life, there are people one meets whose essential being is so in tune with our own, whose presence in our life is so necessary, that the person becomes a kind of family. A room in one's home is prepared. The room is designed to suit the tastes of the more-than-friend, the furnishings and the colors and the items in the room all relate to the person's family and achievements. The more-than-friend is brought to their new home place, and in true Islandian fashion, the existence of this space is taken as proof that the claims of tanrydoon are in place: One can never be barred from the home-place, one can never be so lost or so alone that the certainty of welcome and acceptance is withdrawn or abrogated without the most appalling provocation.
Dorn offers Lang tanrydoon. Lang has a home-place, a family claim, a harbor and haven...despite the fact that Dorn fights everything Lang's job stands for. It doesn't matter...Dorn loves Lang in the uniquely Islandian way described by the word linamia or powerful loving friendship, needs his friendship and his companionship, and makes him understand that his place among the Dorns is always his.
I thought then, and I think now, that this is the most beautiful, the most moving, the most fulfilling passage in the book, and a cultural notion that should be encouraged in our solipsistic, anomie-ridden place and time. How much less hatred there would be if such an idea was encouraged and enacted.
This book is, to me, what Lord of the Rings is to others: A vision of a complete world that, if the Universe was properly run, would be accessible to us mere mortal humans.
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