THE FLYING ISLAND

An island overtakes its small and dwindling human population in significance and interest.

There’s nothing like a remote island to get a novelist’s creative juices flowing. This is especially true when the island is remote and desolate and those living on it are possessed of numerous traditions and tics that are in danger of disappearing under the onslaught of a foreign culture. In the case of The Flying Island, that island is a lonely rock in the Azores named Pico, and the novelist’s stand-in is an unnamed Italian woman who comes there to stay in a rented house by the sea. A tourist who would never think of herself as a tourist, she communes with the locals and becomes immersed in their lives, such as they are. Her main companion is the elderly and garrulous Joao Freitas. Like seemingly most everyone else in the islands, Joao went off to find his fortune—or at least some work—in America and seems to have given up his soul in the process, substituting it with rampant consumerism and alcohol. The pensive narrator comes across other types as well, the earth-motherly Maria Silva and the Lima sisters, Isabel and Maria Jose. As should be obvious, little happens in this fey little volume. Petri seemingly wanted to write a haunted story about a windswept island slowly being lost to history and cross it with some comical anti-Americanism. Whenever the occasional US tourists appear, they are loud and grotesquely fat. Even the Lima sister who married an American, as opposed to a Mexican man as her sister did, is shown as stupid and cow-like.

Petri’s moody hand works some dark magic in these pages, but the story more often becomes unintentionally hilarious, thanks to its bourgeois pretensions.