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A cornerstone of Swiss modernism, at last available in English translation from one of the great German translators of our time.

Baur and Bindschädler, two old men, friends from their days in the army, portion a habitual walk to the edge of a town, Baur speaking incessantly—circling amid past and present, inconsequential observations and unfathomed insights—while Bindschädler, evenly unmoored, listens, observes, and reflects. A meandering meditation on mortality, and a tame supplement to the work of contemporaries Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard—not to mention Gerhard Meier’s countryman Robert Walser—Isle of the Dead elevates a simple ramble along a riverside to the status of a metaphysical inquest, with Baur and Bindschädler’s words and thoughts looping and colliding until it is closely totally unlikely to tell one man from the other.

From the afterword by Burton Pike:
“Constant here are the insistent wind, the drifting clouds, the autumnal leaf- whirling and coat-billowing gusts and breezes, and the ever-recurring cycle of nature. The reader must relax into the aura of the characters’ thoughts and observations, and over the original few pages let himself or herself be drawn into the absorbing world that Meier has so skillfully formulated . . . ”

“Isle of the Dead is a subtle novel in regards to a meticulously elaborate world. What distinguishes it from other modern novels, from the works of Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard for instance, is that it does not convey an alienation from life but a sense of wonder, conveyed with wit and humor, and, underneath the wonder, regret.”

About the AuthorGerhard Meier was born in 1917. Spending six months in a sanatorium for tuberculosis made him determine to leave his occupation at a lamp factory and devote himself altogether to writing. He produced a steady stream of poetry and fiction thereafter, dying in 2008 at the age of 91.

Burton Pike is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and German at CUNY. He co-translated Musil’s The Man without Qualities and Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. His translations have appeared in a great deal of periodicals.

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