Hip Hops: On old books, new beer labels and timeless bung-starters
A fractious month of January calmed somewhat near the end, providing a relatively peaceful space to finish reading the year’s opening novel: The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen (1903-1989), who was German by birth but opposed Nazism throughout his life. Thelen’s work is a fictionalized account of the author’s self-exile on the Spanish island of Majorca (Mallorca) in the 1930s, hailed by none other than his fellow German writer Thomas Mann as “one of the greatest books of the twentieth century.” Mann’s assessment is accurate. In all respects the novel is a self-deprecating, digressive, tragi-comic and thoroughly entertaining account of life and death amid the gathering storm clouds presaging the Spanish Civil War and later, World War II. What does this have to do with beer? I’m glad you ask. In Thelen’s novel, the chronically underemployed but well-educated and multilingual narrator accepts an occasional position as tour guide, greeting boatloads of...Read more