The Great Blasket Island, setting for On an Irish Island
Kirkus Reviews
ON AN IRISH ISLAND [STARRED REVIEW]
Author: Kanigel, Robert
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.
Author tour to Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.
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I write books, sometimes on quirky topics, like leather and its inspired imitators; that was the subject of my last book, Faux Real, which came out in a new paperback edition last fall.
On an Irish Island, just published, took me to a windswept island village off the coast of Ireland, the setting for a story of love and friendship, literature and language, in the early years of the twentieth century.
I've also written about the French Riviera; the Indian mathematician Ramanujan; the first efficiency expert, Frederick Winslow Taylor; and about mentor relationships among elite scientists.
Before I started writing books in the mid-1980s, I wrote magazine articles, essays, and reviews, hundreds of them. But once I started with books I couldn't get enough of them -- loved those great big projects that took me into new intellectual and physical worlds and demanded my best energies for the three or four years it took to research and write them.
Now, after a twelve year stint as a professor at MIT, I once again live in Baltimore, where I have spent most of my adult life and where I've returned to writing full-time. My next project is a biography of Jane Jacobs..
