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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 55 > Reviews >Darrell Kastin's The Undiscovered Island

The Undiscovered Island
Darrell Kastin
University of MA Dartmouth Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture
ISBN Number: 9781933227238

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          In 2009, I have reviewed two small press novels that I wish would get the large scale readership and attention they deserve. The first is Wave Mechanics: A Love Story by Ricardo L. Nirenberg. The Undiscovered Island by Darrell Kastin is the second, though I am heartened to see that mine has not been the only review of this remarkable book and that its Amazon ranking throughout December has been healthy. The Undiscovered Island deserves all of this and more, for it is a book of wonders—a family saga, a chronicle of Portuguese history as it was and should have been, a scholarly text, a Quixotic quest, and a beguiling mystery. Whether or not the novel is a fantasy, I cannot say, because its poetic, dream-like plot melds the ordinary and the extraordinary so seamlessly, believably, and, dare I say, realistically that “fantastical” seems like not only an unimaginative descriptor but also an inaccurate one.

          The Undiscovered Island’s plot begins simply enough: Julia do Canto e Castro travels from California to Faial Island, one of the nine in the Azores archipelago, to search for her father Sebastião, a poet, author, scholar, adventurer, and all-around dreamer who has abruptly and mysteriously vanished. But contrary to this description, The Undiscovered Island is not a detective story; instead of spending her time questioning the island’s residents and digging for clues, Julia soon immerses herself among the poetry books, maps, genealogical charts, and countless anecdotes both legendary and historical (and sometimes both) in Sebastião’s claustrophobic study. Slowly, her search becomes less about the external and more about the internal, less about her father’s whereabouts than her own cultural identity and place in the tapestry of Portugal’s colorful history, which sweeps throughout the book with the force and magnificence of the unnatural waves that crash against the island’s shores.

          The book’s island setting is, of course, no accident. Islands actual and mythical pop up throughout the text, from the hauntingly beautiful Azores, to any number of phantom islands including: the vanished Island of Atlantis, Hy-Brasil, and the Enchanted Island, which may or may not be erupting from the bottom of the ocean around the Azores as Julia conducts her search. Like the ghosts, sirens, and gods once believed to haunt the waters, and who may still haunt the Azores, these phantom islands seem to exist just on the periphery of human consciousness, in the blind spots of vision.
          Spend a little time on the islands and you begin to feel that some kind of game—cat-and-mouse, hide and go seek—is being played. Something is hidden; you are not seeing all there is to see. The islands themselves appear to do the hiding, revealing only a glimpse here, then there, as if to keep certain secrets safe from the eyes of those who are peering too closely; an ability to camouflage what it deems necessary to hide. Then, when something is revealed, you are startled, unprepared for its discovery.
          But as Sebastião’s obsessive journal entries point out and as Julia (and later another member of her family) learn, this mystery is their siren-like allure. Indeed, it is at the heart of humanity’s restless, strenuous, and sometimes fatal quest to find meaning, connection, and wonder in the cosmos.
          What meaning is there in an island? Is it merely a result of geological forces at work, tectonic plates in collision? Or is there perhaps something more, something other than molten magma, lava erupting from cracks and fissures in the crust and cooling, becoming land mass, more than its changes upon the atmosphere, the sea? … What does an island represent, what can it conjure? To a person on a boat, whether alone or in the company of others, an island can hold all hopes and dreams, no matter how fantastical.
          To answer these questions, Kastin tests the reader’s imagination, attention, and sense of wonder to (and perhaps beyond) their limits in a barrage of images and plotlines. As mentioned earlier, Julia’s quest to find her father and her own identity as a Portuguese woman is frequently interrupted by Sebastião’s journal entries. But Kastin does not allow the book to remain so neat. Rather, he unbalances the reader at every turn, injecting Portuguese proverbs, quotes from scholarly texts, genealogical records and legends at crucial points in the plot, and sometimes seemingly at random. These legends range from what appear to be bits of Portuguese folklore to powerful original stories, including a beautiful and haunting tale about a mythic island near the book’s end in which all the narratives come together in a beautiful Gordian knot of a climax. I will not describe it in any more detail, save to say that doing so would ruin the ultimate surprise in this book of surprises.

          As one might expect, the novel’s viewpoint begins to shift as the book’s pace becomes more frantic, its imagery more dream-like and the terrain of the Azores more volcanic and unstable. While a majority of the book’s first half is seen through Julia’s point of view, the second half leaps from her thoughts to that of another family member (who I will not name so as not to spoil the impact of his appearance), an island detective, and then to an otherworldly family friend who definitely knows more about these strange events than she initially lets on. Indeed, sometimes the author himself slyly ruptures the book’s “fourth wall,” not only by inserting digressions which patently do not come from Sebastião’s writing but also by shifting the book’s narrative voice just enough to reveal that someone else whom we have not met (and who appears to be in control of the story) is speaking. Far from making the book convoluted or difficult to follow, this narrative instability beautifully parallels the novel’s polyphonous structure and thesis—that human history is a confluence of voices, individuals, destinies, and desires reaching out for one another.

          Needless to say, readers who demand that a novel proceed at a breakneck pace to remain entertaining, or even readable, will likely struggle through The Undiscovered Island’s long and numerous poetic accounts of Portuguese history, from the exploits of the country’s famous explorers and conquerors to the tragic love story of Inês de Castro and King Pedro the Just (Pedro I), the latter of which becomes increasingly central to the plot as the novel progresses. Those who enjoy or who can content themselves with a much slower (though never tedious) pace will be rewarded not only with a cast of fascinating, complex characters but also with Kastin’s philosophical, poetic prose which becomes denser as the novel progresses, solidifying much like the island itself that haunted Sebastião’s imagination and which seems to set all of history in motion.

          Make no mistake: the book is, indeed, a whirlwind that will likely leave the reader’s mind and body exhausted. However, this is the blissful exhaustion felt after a long and wondrous search and the exhaustion of having learned much despite ending up with more questions than answers.

          I am not Portuguese myself, nor am I an expert on Portuguese-American literature, so to call The Undiscovered Island a landmark of Portuguese-American literature would be presumptive. I will, however, call it a book that can stand toe-to-toe with the work of Umberto Eco (who, incidentally, also wrote about a phantom island in his frustratingly breathtaking The Island of the Day Before Yesterday) and a major work of the 21st Century’s first decade. It is one of those rare books that sticks to the heart as well as the mind, possibly remaining with the reader throughout his or her life.

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