At the beginning of Antigone Kefala’s The Island, a university student named Melina is offered a theory by her boss, a researcher. He argues that the only people capable of understanding history are those who live across cultures, inhabit multiple worlds: who belong to no single place. “People in between,” he says, have a special way of seeing.
Melina is one of those “people in between.” Her origins, loosely sketched, are in an old Europe, a place of bathhouses and ornate furniture and brocade curtains, but when she was young her family was displaced by war. They became refugees, living among “the breaths of people stale and tired” in a hotel by the sea, before making their way to the titular “island,” a place of rainy green hills, “with sheep permanently grazing in the same spots, as if they had been painted there.” Melina’s memories of her past are partial and hazy, formed mostly from secondhand stories, but they color her vision and intervene upon the present. She is here on the island, but she is also, always, elsewhere.
First published in Australia in 1984 and newly rereleased by Transit Books, The Island is a beguiling portrait of Melina’s fragmented consciousness. Equally, it is a portrait of a young woman trying to figure out who and how to be. The places aren’t named, but the protagonist’s path trails Kefala’s. The author was born in Romania in 1931, and after the Soviet occupation she fled to refugee camps in Greece before migrating to New Zealand and finally Australia, where, in her fourth language, she began to write poetry and fiction.
Oblique and impressionistic, the book hinges not on plot but on Kefala’s fertile, intensely observant prose. As Melina goes through the motions of a young person’s life—roaming the city with friends, studying at university, singing in concerts, learning the thrills and disappointments of love—she feels endlessly alone, estranged from the people around her. She is restless and desirous, “full of longing for unknown things… a longing for something that would raise us, as in Byzantine paintings, make us float through the air, disappear in shafts of light, become a line in space.” She and her family are haunted by a sense of dislocation, but their nostalgia for a lost home also gives them an identity. The past is “a sort of breath that moulded us and which we could no longer escape,” offering “a value and a weight that nothing around was capable of giving us.”
Melina perceives the world at a heightened remove, which suffuses her everyday life with mystical strangeness. Cellos at a concert are “golden totem poles bathing in electric suns… and the bells, exotic primitive silver gods waiting to be touched.” Her emotions are like a paintbrush over the world, creating a constant interplay between interiority and exteriority; everywhere, she sees her psyche reflected back at her. A bleak morning is “charged with the cry of lawn mowers.” Like her, a tree is “vulnerable and young, glass tears hanging from its arms.” A glass of water on her bedside evokes her own existential fears: “The light caressing the water with the hands of a lover, the transparent shades that stirred in it… I was afraid for it, a fragile, marvellously balanced beautiful thing that could not possibly last.”
This is a slim book, but its dense lyricism makes it feel expansive. As Kefala roves across Melina’s memories, dreams, and daily rhythms, often in a single page, the distinctions between those realms start to collapse. Her dreams are often more detailed than her memories, and scenes from her lived reality are imbued with the surreal. Time stretches and contracts, reflecting the nonlinearity of displacement and movement, the migrant’s ability to exist in different places simultaneously. Often it is hard to know whether a day has passed in the book, or several months, but it doesn’t matter. The pleasure of The Island is in its layered sentences, which ask to be unraveled and savored. Like an abstract painting, the book is an atmosphere, a universe with its own rules rather than a linear experience. And it reveals itself slowly, with patient looking.
Publisher: Transit Books Page count: 128 Price: $18.95 Key quote: “The secret heart of the land seemed to be yearning for that uninterrupted silence free of humans that had been there before, the presence of that time still in the land’s memory.” Shelve next to: Etel Adnan, Italo Calvino, Clarice Lispector Unscientifically calculated reading time: One sun-dappled afternoon beside a river
