What a delight! Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands is a curious little book. A bit bigger than ‘pocket size’ (or maybe my pockets are too small….), a striking use of colour (bright orange paired with aqua blue fore-edges), and crammed with fascinating facts about islands that are essentially dots on a world map.

I think I’ve mentioned my love of maps before – clearly Schalansky shares that love. She grew up in East Germany, with an atlas – its lines, colours and names, replaced the real places that she could not visit. –

And as a child of the atlas, I had never travelled. The fact that a girl in my class had actually been born in Helsinki felt unimaginable.

In searching the atlas for her own country, the German Democratic Republic, Schalansky was surprised –

East Germans could not travel, only the Olympic team were allowed beyond our borders. It took a frighteningly long time to find. It was as pink and tiny as my smallest fingernail. This was hard to equate: at the Seoul Olympics we had been a force to reckon with, we had won more medals than the United States: how could we suddenly be so infinitesimal?

Schalansky’s first atlas was ‘committed to an ideology’ that –

…was clear from its map of the world, carefully positioned on a double-page spread so that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic fell on two separate pages. On this map there was no wall dividing the two German countries, no Iron Curtain; instead, there was the blinding white, impassable edge of the page.

A year later, everything changed when the German Democratic Republic disappeared from the map and it suddenly became possible to travel the world – Schalansky, with her atlas, continued to explore from her parents’ sitting room, tracing places with her finger and whispering foreign names.

Her interest in remote islands came later – a globe in relief in the Berlin National Library; comparisons of map projections and how they skew space; and a typography professor sharing antique maps, all piqued her interest.

Many islands lie so far from their mother countries that they no longer fit on the maps of that country. They are mostly left out altogether, but sometimes they are granted a place at a cartographical side table, hemmed in by a framed box and with a separate scale measure squashed at the edge… They become footnotes to the mainland, expendable to an extent, but also disproportionately more interesting.

Schalansky describes 50 remote islands. For each she includes the co-ordinates, whose territory it is, population, distance to nearest land masses, significant points in history and a map.

Each island has an amazing story – a point in its natural or social history that is remarkable.

An island offers a stage: everything that happens on it is practically forced to turn into a story, into a chamber piece in the middle of nowhere, into the stuff of literature.

I can’t recount every story but there were some standouts –

• the tragedy of St Kilda, beyond the Outer Hebrides, where babies rarely survived more than a few days. The infant mortality rate was variously attributed to the islanders diet of fatty meat (fulmars and their eggs, that made the mothers’ skin silky smooth but her milk bitter); inbreeding; or that the babies were suffocated by the smoke from the peat fires.
• Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Archipelago, in the British Indian Ocean Territory. In 1967, the Chagossians were ‘resettled’ in Port Louis after the British Crown granted Mauritius independence but retained the Archipelago, in exchange for three million pounds –  ‘…a criminal act by a colonial power, a dirty deal in the glittering ocean…’. The Archipelago was then leased for one dollar a year, and used as a joint UK–US military base. In October 2024, the UK engaged in discussions with Mauritius with a view to transfer sovereignty of the islands, while allowing the military base to remain under a 99-year lease – ‘…the Chagossians’ homeland remains a restricted zone, a navy and air force base. Its name: Camp Justice…’.
• The six-year-old French boy, Marc Liblin, who was taught a completely unknown language in his dreams. He is fluent and as an adult, comes to the attention of university researchers who try in vain to decipher his language. In a chance encounter with a barkeeper, a former sailor, the language is identified as similar to that of remote Polynesian islands. Marc is introduced to a woman who speaks his language; and he, who has never been outside of Europe, marries her, and in 1983 they move to the island where their language (Rapa) is spoken – Rapa Iti.

This atlas totally captivated me.

4/5