I finished reading
Island of the World by Michael O’Brien. It took a couple of weeks. I read it on my Kindle and it seemed long…so I looked it up on Amazon….. 850 pages!
Island of the World is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s difficult to put into words how the book touched me. It’s a book that goes deep down into your soul. I wanted to read it fast because I wanted to see what happened next…and yet, I wanted to read it slow because it was full of profound thoughts and insights. It’s like no other book I’ve read before. It is beautiful and devastating at the same time. Ultimately it’s about redemption and forgiveness and it’s about finding peace.
Here is a synopsis of the book from Amazon:
“Island of the World is the story of a child born in 1933 into the turbulent world of the Balkans and tracing his life into the third millennium. The central character is Josip Lasta, the son of an impoverished school teacher in a remote village high in the mountains of the Bosnian interior. As the novel begins, World War II is underway and the entire region of Yugoslavia is torn by conflicting factions: German and Italian occupying armies, and the rebel forces that resist them—the fascist Ustashe, Serb nationalist Chetniks, and Communist Partisans. As events gather momentum, hell breaks loose, and the young and the innocent are caught in the path of great evils. Their only remaining strength is their religious faith and their families.
For more than a century, the confused and highly inflammatory history of former Yugoslavia has been the subject of numerous books, many of them rife with revisionist history and propaganda. The peoples of the Balkans live on the border of three worlds: the Islamic, the orthodox Slavic East, and Catholic Europe, and as such they stand in the path of major world conflicts that are not only geo-political but fundamentally spiritual. This novel cuts to the core question: how does a person retain his identity, indeed his humanity, in absolutely dehumanizing situations?
In the life of the central character, the author demonstrates that this will demand suffering and sacrifice, heroism and even holiness. When he is twelve years old, his entire world is destroyed, and so begins a lifelong Odyssey to find again the faith which the blows of evil have shattered. The plot takes the reader through Josip's youth, his young manhood, life under the Communist regime, hope and loss and unexpected blessings, the growth of his creative powers as a poet, and the ultimate test of his life. Ultimately this novel is about the crucifixion of a soul—and resurrection.”
A few quotes from the book:
“We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here.”
***
“In this world are many people who do not master their bodies. Such people say that no one can tell them what to do, not even God, and they think that in this way they have no master. In the end they become slaves to anything.”
***
“’I’m saying that through genuine culture man can know himself, even in nations where his identity is denied.’
‘But what do you mean by genuine culture?’
‘The beautiful and true! In music, in poetry, in literature, even in novels without political or historical references, we can apprehend what is not immediately known through rational thought or the accumulation of objective facts.’”
***
“’Culture is the last refuge, the sanctuary, the human place in the midst of the surrounding dehumanization. Through the arts man is able to know himself, even if only on the intuitive level. He senses his own worth, even when he cannot articulate is.’
‘Can a poem or a song defeat a tyrant?’
Defeat a killer, defeat atrocities, defeat the bottom falling out of the universe when you least expect?
‘Yes. Yes, it can, given enough time. When a work of art is both beautiful and true, man’s freedom is strengthened by it – both his interior need for freedom and his capacity to seek a rational understanding of it.’”
