Rating: 
Summary: It's not bad, but it's not *that* good
Review: It's hard to disagree with the New York Times, the NewYorker, and all the other Amazon reviewers, but I feel I owe it to potential readers to throw a little cold water on Islandia. This book takes place in the first decade of the 20th century and was published (after the author's death) in its fourth decade, but it's really a 19th century novel. The style has much more in common with Dickens or Melville than, say, Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Mr. Wright didn't have the benefit of Strunk and White's advice (Eschew surplusage!) and I would guess he didn't view Samuel Clemens as an influence. This book is long! and relatively little happens in it. As an example of how things tend to drag on in Islandia, on page 288 of my paperback edition, the following paragraph appears: "There I remained for seven days ... I was alone a great deal. Nothing exciting happened" You might think this was the writer's way of saying that he was not going to dwell on the those unexciting events, but you'd be wrong. The next 10 pages detail those seven days. Sure, at least one significant conversation took place and we are introduced to a character who pops up occasionally in the remainder of the book, but 5000 words? The book's purported theme, the conflict between the contented Islandians and the opportunist forces who would profit by developing Islandia, is as relevant today as it's been this entire century, but the real subject of the novel is how a young man comes to terms with his sexuality in a country where the women have ideas he finds strange. One could view this novel as a work of fiction or as an intellectual exploration of a possible utopia. If you're considering this "utopian fanatasy" because of the fantasy aspect, you'll be much happier with The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, or the socio-space fiction of the great British writer, Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argus, etc.). If you want to explore a utopia, try Walden II or the famous anti-utopia, 1984, or my candidate for the top contender in this area, Aldous Huxley's (similarly named) Island. The last is a great work of literature, taut and beautifully written - a book in which one actually cares about the characters. A few miscellaneous comments: Other reviewers glow over Wright's poetic language. Despite the subject matter - people's emotions and the Islandian landscape - I find the words technically precise and frequently dry, as in a legal document. I don't feel the drive or the pulse or the excitement or the *economy* of poetry. There's much description of the wonderful countryside, but it all seems terribly familiar to anyone who's traveled around the eastern sea-board. The event that determines Islandia's future, a supposed poll of the population, is somehow unknown to an entire faction of the Islandian governing society. There's no crime in Islandia. The reason is a complex system of family values (which extends to landowner/"tenant" values): proof by Wright's emphasis. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to live in Islandia, but reading Wright's account of it became a chore after the first 200 odd pages.
Rating: 
Summary: rakes with the greatest of books
Review: Iv read many books and have had many experiences, his book has the aliblity to break you apart then build you back again into a greater person. I normlally only read complete fantasy and sci fy (moorcock, tolkien...) but this book was problebly one of the greatest ever. you could read it in a week or in a mounth. its intricate plot twistes your mind to wish for one thing or another and makes you belive that it anything possible at times and makes you feel nothing but dispair at others. when a book can enslave your mood and your personality such as this one has it is truly a work of art. it can compelle you to dream in your normall sleep of this land and wish you were there. islandia desevres no critic and i have no problem reccomendin it to every human being alive.
Rating:
Summary: EVERY RENOWN MODERN UTOPIA NOVEL DERIVES FROM THIS ONE.
Review: Just as every great city is just a pale shadow of Roger Zelazny's Amber, all other modern utopian novels are imcomplete facimiles of Islandia. It reads like "Ecotopia" where a man made petty and cynical by our world as we know it is sent to an isolated and mysterious land where he eventually discovers his true self. His transformation causes him to crave the kind of honesty and integrity in others which only can be found in Islandia. Suggestion: If you have a choice, buy the biggest and most expensive copy you can find. Cheaper copies have thin, translucent pages and tiny, ant-sized font. Enjoy
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Summary: A "must read" for those weary of the usual escapist fare!
Review: My father introduced my to Islandia when I was 13, and it left a permanent impression on me. It had apparently left a similar impression on him, as he had taken the 1944 printing from the University he attended. It is a very detailed and wonderful world into which the reader is drawn... Buy the book and remember, "Your room has been prepared for you.." and you need only read further to understand what an honor it is!
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Summary: Warning: Islandia May Cause Lasting Depression
Review: My only problem with Islandia is that it has caused me to be deeply depressed as I have compared it with reality from the time I read it as a teenager through the 30 years since. I wonder why men and women can't be as sensible as they are in Islandia, and why society can't be as harmless. Read it at your own risk, but read it anyway. It is #1 in my fiction list, followed closely by Dune, and then The Gormenghast Trilogy.
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Summary: We who love Islandia have probably never been sharecroppers.
Review: My wife, then my girlfriend, and I first read Islandia when we were urban teen-age proto-hippies thinking of subsistance farming as a way of life. We bought a dozen of the paperbacks and gave then out to our friends. We've read it at least a half-dozen times each in the 35 years since. Now we are looking to retirement soon, moving out of the metropolis where we made well-paid careers, and so we are reading Islandia again. But now, even if the current edition weren't so expensive, I don't think I would be handing out so freely. Why? The Islandian way of life is basically feudalism, with class positions based on family lines and no chance of ever escaping the life-chance you were born with. Lang's friends Dorn and Dorna sit at the top of the feudal hierarchy and we view the economy and society through the eyes of their circle of noble families. Worse, Wright goes out of his way to assure us that Islandians are white. Their historic enemies, the primitive tribes like the Mountain Bants that figure so importantly in the plot, he also tells us repeatedly, are black. In its racial attitudes, you can tell this manuscript was written by a patrician New Englander in the 1920s. In its gender attitudes, you really can't. If your family is high enough in the hierarchy, you can shape Islandia's future whether you are woman or man. Young men and women actively pursue love and sex -- ania and apia -- with equal enthusiasm. The conspicuously and unusually patriarchal Lord Hyth is roundly criticized. Finally, why is this called a teen fiction book? It is no more so than any of the other classic authors like Twain and Dickens that we think teens should read. It was not originally written, posthumously edited, or published for teens. If teens like it, as we did, good. But it is our book too.
Rating:
Summary: One of my all-time favorite novels.
Review: Reading ISLANDIA is like visiting another country, one I would love to visit and might even consider living in. The world-building of Austin Tappan Wright drew me in and kept me entranced for 1000 pages. This is one of the very few novels that I revisit and reread, one of the few I've gone out looking for in a first edition. The characters are complex and endearing. The style is leisurely. There really is a plot, honest. But the book doesn't depend on the plot. It depends on the exploration of a different society and the interactions of its people with a young and naive American. I had decided to write an amazon.com note about ISLANDIA before I saw that my name is on the "readers who bought ISLANDIA also bought books by..." list -- but the list made my day. Vonda N. McIntyre
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Summary: You will stay in Islandia, but you can't go there.
Review: The odd thing about "Islandia" is that Austen Tappan Wright, the author, did not write the book-Islandia grew. Wright, a lawyer in the 1920s, created the country he called Islandia simply as a hobby. He created its language, geography, history, customs, schooling, habits, etiquette and all the threads that bind a nation and its people. Mr. Wright died early. His wife had the time and the talent to arrange and sift his mountain of papers and drawings into the classic that is "Islandia." It is an adventure story and an aching love story. As the reader travels through Islandia, baubles of facts and social issues are tossed in just as part of the tale. For example, when two people meet, whether strangers or close friends, they greet each other by stating their own names-not the other's. What a blessing this would be! The novel starts when a New England student becomes friends with an Islandian fellow student. Of course, he goes to Islandia and you go to a place within your mind you'll never completely leave. What quickly becomes a captivating novel is an adventure story, within a love story, within a crisis between conflicting cultural attitudes and responsibilties. Without any denigration of the story, the memorable aspect is how we, in the industrial Twentieth Century, perceive cultural aspects of other societies. The most tragic of frictions betweeen people is cultural, not racial. Sometime after reading it, you will forget (perhaps, not even think about) the basic story, but you'll never look at things and people as you did before. After some forty years, I still pine for Islandia, not for the story, but for its feeling. Art in writing is neither explaining nor telling. It is stimulating specific emotions. Without question, this book is art. It never reads as fantasy or fiction. You almost know there is a land called Islandia Now, in this age of self-righteous federal control of public schools and even control of our conversational speech, "Islandia" would be a perfect required reading in the eleventh grade for students in an academic curriculum. We can't have everything, but we can have something. Islandia might be one "something" as being the one literate book many students will have absorbed before going to college; a book they liked, enjoyed, respected, thought about and will remember. As they mature, many insights and understandings will be stirred and they will think back to Islandia. ISLANDIA DEFINES ITSELF. It is not a multiple choice book. Teachers should NOT discuss the book before their students have read it. The students will better talk about it among themselves. Here's an exam: "Pretend to tell a good friend your thoughts about the land of Islandia. Tell what you think is good or bad and explain your reasons. Explain three kinds of love for which they have words. Explain the relationship between their freedoms and responsibilities compared with our's in the United States of America
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Summary: One of the best books about a fictional utopia I have read
Review: This is a beautiful book about an island utopia trying to decide whether to continue its isolation from the rest of the world or open itself to the commercial and cultural influences of outsiders. The book is written from the perspective of the young US counsel, put into place by commercial interests who want to extend their reach into Islandia. The counsel is torn between the duties of his position and his growing involvement with a country whose culture and mores are highly developed,but very different from his own. Full of political intrigue, romance, clash of cultures, and elegantly written. This is a book you want to reread as soon as you finish it
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Summary: A true classic of utopian fantasy
Review: This is my very favorite book, bar none, and has been since I first read it 20 years ago. Hero John Lang attends Harvard (Class of 1905) with Dorn, a young man from Islandia, a mysterious, xenophobic country struggling to deal with incursions from rest of the world. Upon graduating, he finds himself unable to choose a career, so he decides to use his language skill (Dorn teaches him Islandian one summer vacation in Maine) and is granted a rarely-issued entry visa. Though he never truly fits in, he becomes involved in Islandia's curious culture in various ways, and ends up at the crux of a national debate there, related in part to a German military threat. (Islandia is on the northern end of an Australia-like continent, never clearly located but probably in the far southern Pacific.) Wright carried Islandia in his head, expanding it from a childhood fantasy into hundreds of thousands of words of narrative and description of the place. [Sailing on Cape Cod once, he remarked that a particular bay looked just like another in Islandia.] He was killed in a car accident in Las Vegas in 1931, and his editor and family took 11 years to cut about 70% of his words to winnow the book to its still formidable length (it's 1,000 pages long). The book is wonderfully written and edited, with a smooth, lovely style. It's a bit slow by contemporary standards, but the description of Islandia's language, e.g. there are 4 words for love (romantic, strong friendship, desire, and one unique to Islandia's family-centric society), culture, and country, are beautifully done. Example: he's helping plow one day, and is horrified to find human remains right in the main field. His hosts quietly explain that when people die, they are of course returned to the land they loved, and they carefully return the bones to the furrow. In subsequent conversation, his hosts are equally horrified to hear how corpses are handled in America. The plot tracks John Lang's development from a young man, through his coming-of-age, finding himself, and coming to terms with his simultaneous love for and alienness in Islandia, and ultimately accepting who he is. First published in 1942, it was a minor cult classic in the early '60s, and though it's a bit dated in terms of feminism, for example, it remains my favorite book of all time. If there was an Islandia, I'd be there now...
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