The island of ultimate truth

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The Island of Ultimate Truth is a novel by the Argentine- born Catalan-speaking writer and journalist Flavia Company , the original of which was published in 2010 ( L'illa de l'última veritat ) and a German translation by Kirsten Brandt from Catalan published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2011 . The work is a parable whose literary models are evidently found in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Umberto Eco's The Island of the previous day .

content

In flashbacks, Matthew Prendel tells his story to his fiancée Phoebe: At his invitation, two friends and he wanted to cross the Atlantic with his yacht five years ago . But in the middle of the ocean they are attacked by pirates . He shoots one of the attackers with his pistol , causing him to go overboard. But the other crooks kill Prendel's companion while his leg is injured and tries to save himself by jumping into the sea.

For several days the shipwrecked man drifts helplessly on the high seas, tormented by thirst, exhaustion and fear. But the current drives him to the beach of a lonely island that doesn't seem to be on any nautical chart . There a stranger seems to have saved him, whose fate seems fatefully linked to his. This man, of all people, is the pirate that Matthew Prendel shot.

Then Prendel is plagued again by fears and doubts, because he does not want to be dependent on this person and feels in his heart that his own character will not necessarily change for the better in this currently hopeless situation. What other secret compels you to live separately on the island? Because the pirate banishes Matthew to the remotest corner of the island. Only after years does Prendel find out that the other has both food supplies and a lifeboat. The dissolution of both lines of fate in this Robinsonad harbors a surprise.

expenditure

  • Flavia Company: L'illa de l'última veritat . Ed. Proa, 2010.
  • Flavia Company: La isla de la ultima verdad . Lumen, Barcelona 2011. (Spanish translation)
  • Flavia Company: The Island of Ultimate Truth. Translated from Catalan by Kirsten Brandt. Bloomsbury, Berlin 2011, 180 pages, ISBN 978-3-8270-0988-3 .

review

Christine Westermann enthusiastically praised the novel in her WDR , even if she had to admit that she had her bookseller explain the liquidation to her in retrospect - but you could also come up with it yourself.

Georf Leifels joined the hook this judgment largely on: "You can expect more than a flawless adventure novel whose voltage is not to beat and therefore totally surprised in the final sequence because we thought they already understood everything. A good novel labyrinth has a hell of a lot of corridors. "

"It is a wonderfully told character study and development story that the Flavia Company understands unpretentiously in its slim book with a multitude of text passages and simple sentences of true knowledge that will resonate for a long time," said M. Lehmann-Pape.

“Sometimes the Robinsonad is a little predictable. But Flavia Company understands its literary craft very well and the really surprising ending has it all. "

reception

Audio book

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christine Westermann : Book presentation of The Island of Last Truth ( Memento from May 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) on WDR 2 . Broadcast on March 20, 2011. Retrieved September 6, 2011.
  2. ↑ http://christine-westermann.de/seite/aktuelles/2011/03/18/flavia-company-die-insel-der-letzt-wahrheit/
  3. ↑ hook . September 2011, p. 13.
  4. ↑ http://www.rezensions-seite.de/rezensions/belletristik/flavia-company-die-insel-der-letzt-wahrheit/
  5. ↑ Recommend Berlin booksellers. Peter-Matthias Petras, Petras bookstore: I'm reading ... Flavia Company: The island of ultimate truth . In: Berliner Morgenpost . March 17, 2011. Retrieved March 27, 2012.