Island of the Mad
A Novel
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Following on the heels of her exciting and widely acclaimed A Monster's Notes, and with Sheck's characteristic brilliance of language, Island of the Mad follows the solitary, hunchbacked Ambrose A., as he sets out on a mysterious journey to Venice in search of a lost notebook he knows almost nothing about.
Eventually he arrives in San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, in the Venetian Lagoon, only a few minutes' boat–ride from Venice. At the island's old, abandoned hospital which has been turned into a conference center, he discovers a mess of papers in a drawer, and among them the correspondence and notes of two of the island's former inhabitants—a woman with a rare genetic illness which causes the afflicted to gradually become unable to sleep until, increasingly hallucinatory and feverish, they essentially die of sleeplessness; and her friend, a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman's eyesight fails, she wants only one thing—that her friend read to her from Dostoevsky's great novel, The Idiot, a book she loves but can no longer read herself. As Ambrose follows their strange tale, everything he has ever known or thought is called into question.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her follow-up to A Monster's Notes, Sheck again channels the voice of a disfigured protagonist to create this novel that reads like a lucid dream. Told in short chapters composed of choppy paragraphs, the book starts with reclusive Ambrose A. at his menial job electronically archiving old books, somewhere in America. In a break from routine, one day he receives a letter from a coworker he's never spoken to asking him to go to Venice in search of a mysterious notebook. Although he is hunchbacked and suffers from a rare medical condition that causes his bones to break easily such as by walking through the city Ambrose embarks to the Venetian Lagoon and San Servolo, the "Island of the Mad," where he begins to have visions of Frieda, a young woman who lived through the Venetian plague of 1557. Heavy with allusions to Russian authors Dostoyevski, Turgenev, and Bulgakov Frieda is a character from Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita Sheck's book takes up weighty themes such as perspectivism and the nature of time by considering 16th-century Venice through the eyes of writers and artists who found themselves in the city. Although the book can feel repetitive, with colors and motifs repeating themselves ad nauseam, the book's insularity is also one of its strengths. Sheck pulls readers through the time-worn canals of Venice on a literary romp that will please fans of the historical and the fantastic alike.
