ATLAS OF REMOTE ISLANDS
Amsterdam Island
(France)
Indian Ocean
37° 50' N | 77° 33' E
FRENCH Nouvelle Amsterdam
58 km2 | 25 inhabitants
NO ONE IS ALLOWED to settle here, so the personnel at the research station changes constantly. Some of the men stay for only a few months, but most for a year and a half, on the island that they call simply Ams or La Base. None speak English and all greet each other every day with a handshake. There is no boat. Where would they take it? This place is a stray piece of France, a cross on a blue nowhere on the various maps of the world that are pinned to the walls, alongside a couple of pictures of albatrosses and countless pornographic posters. // Domestic cattle gone wild graze in a large enclosure fenced off with barbed wire. Down on the beach, male fur seals howl. The sea mammals heave themselves ponderously over the rocks. The bulls are fighting for the females, due to arrive in a few days. The victors take up the best spots by the sea. // In the dining hall of Great Skua, the district chief of the 48th mission gives a speech after dinner: There is no such thing as isolation. Even on Amsterdam Island, we are cogs in a huge wheel; here too, we receive signals that tell us who we are. He calls himself a fantasist, a doctor and a professional soldier, in that order. His office is the only room without pin-ups on the wall. There is a register of births, marriages and deaths on his desk. Empty columns show that no one has married or had a child here yet. Everyone who stays on Amsterdam for longer than a year is examined by a medical officer from the south of France to check that he is coping with the long period of restriction of movement and the confined, purely masculine environment. No woman has visited for longer than two days. // At night, the men gather in the small video room in Great Skua to watch one of the porn films from their personal collection. Each man sits in a row on his own. The loudspeakers emit grunts and groans, and the air is heavy with the musky scent of the bull seals.
Courtesy of Judith Schalansky and mareverlag, ©2009 mareverlag, Hamburg; ISBN 978-3-86648-683-6
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The crews on board the racing yachts of the Ocean Race whiz past the world's most remote islands without ever setting foot on them. Would they like to land there one day?
In her "Atlas of Remote Islands", Judith Schalansky takes us to islands "where I have never been and never will be". The author tells the absurdly unfathomable stories of these isles in a way that only reality can imagine.
Judith Schalansky has designed several of her books herself and received design awards for them. Both her "Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln" and "Der Hals der Giraffe" were honoured with the 1st Prize of the Stiftung Buchkunst. in 2021, her book "Verzeichnis einiger Verluste" was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. Judith Schalansky's books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
© mareverlag, Hamburg
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