On an Irish Island

Starred review from January 15, 2012
A richly detailed biographical study of a group of early-20th-century intellectuals whose shared love for a dying insular culture helped save it from extinction. Kanigel (Faux Real: Genuine Leather and Two Hundred Years of Inspired Fakes, 2007, etc.) displays his abundant erudition and narrative finesse in this story of how four European intellectuals--classicist George Thomson, British Museum curator Robin Flower and linguists Carl Marstrander and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt--found their lives forever changed by encounters with the people of Great Blasket Island, off the coast of Ireland. The four traveled to this remote island at different times and for different reasons. Thomson followed the suggestion of his friend and fellow Celtophile Flower and went to Blasket for the "Gaeltacht," the Irish culture which had already enchanted Flower. Marstrander, a Norwegian, sought to examine the linguistic links that bound the Vikings to the ancient Celts. The sophisticated Parisian Sjoestedt sought the opportunity to study one of the most complex linguistic systems in the world. Although the islanders lived in "primitive" conditions, all four visitors became enthralled by the rich island culture. Interwoven among these overlapping, sometimes intersecting biographies are other stories, including that of playwright John Millington Synge, who went to the island to learn spoken Irish; and those of the men and women the four scholars befriended, loved and inspired. Thanks to their influence, dialect-rich folktales and life histories that would otherwise have perished found their way into Irish literary history. The portraits in this book are classic Kanigel: lively, sympathetic and thoroughly engaging. Yet what makes the narrative so affecting is the loss that permeates the text. As cultures like those on Great Blasket continue to be destroyed by the march of progress, so too are our connections to a simpler, more personally fulfilling way of living. A mesmerizing interplay of lives and socio-historical contexts.

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March 15, 2012

Kanigel (formerly science writing, MIT; The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan) aims to contextualize the early 20th-century literary and linguistic history of Great Blasket Island, located off the southwest coast of Ireland. He focuses primarily on such outsiders as playwright John Millington Synge, classicist George Thomson, poet Robin Flower, and Celtic studies scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, all of whom came to Great Blasket during this time to live among the island's Irish-speaking community, which remained uniquely untouched by the outside world. Kanigel elaborates on the relationships between visitors to the island and the islanders themselves, considering the encouragement that Thomson, for example, gave locals to write their stories and publish them. The bulk of the book goes through the end of the 1930s, with slighter coverage of the decades thereafter. VERDICT Kanigel has written an accessible book, but his uncritical approach to his sources and a number of small but significant generalizations about Irish history of the period may frustrate the advanced student. Most suitable for those interested in memoirs, light history reading, and travel narratives.--Hanna Clutterbuck, Harvard Univ. Medical Sch. Lib., Boston

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2012
Off the wild west coast of Ireland lies the Great Blasket Island, at once forlorn and disturbingly beautiful. It has remained uninhabited since 1953. Modernity won out; so Kanigel posits in his impressively researched, greatly inviting history of the curious-minded men and women who, in the early twentieth century, came from mainland Ireland and elsewhere to reside on the island for a while, to absorb the slower way of Irish customs before the advent of electricity and other aspects of fast-paced contemporary life. These individuals were especially drawn by an interest in the Irish (Gaelic, that is) language, since Great Blasket was one of the last holdouts where Irish was the daily-spoken tongue. This desire for such total immersion derived in large part from a growing sense of an Irish nationhood as the Emerald Isle moved painfully but inexorably toward home rule. Perhaps the best known of these bent-on-absorption individuals was the great Irish playwright John Millington Synge, whose masterpieces The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea had provenance in his Blasket Island experiences.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)