The Pine Islands

By Marion Poschmann and Jen Calleja

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2019

AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

When Gilbert wakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees - immediately and inexplicably - for Tokyo, where he meets a fellow lost soul: Yosa, a young Japanese student clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide. Together, Gilbert and Yosa set off on a pilgrimage to see the pine islands of Matsushima, one looking for the perfect end to his life, the other for a fresh start.

Playful and profound, The Pine Islands is a beautiful tale of friendship, transformation and acceptance in modern Japan.

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Release date: Mar 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781782834656

Marion Poschmann

Marion Poschmann was born in Essen in 1969. Recognized as one of Germany's foremost poets and novelists, she has won both of Germany's premier poetry prizes. She is the author of four novels, the last three of which have been nominated for the German Book Prize, and she won the prestigious Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize in 2013. The Pine Islands is her first novel to be translated into English. She currently lives in Berlin. 

Reviews for The Pine Islands

[aug3zimm-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I almost think I shouldn't have liked this book, but I did quite enjoy it. It's very dream-like (particularly towards the end) and there are a lot of reflective side wanderings about beards and trees and whatnot that are kind of dull but also kind of hilarious. And I did find this book funny, mostly because of the ridiculousness of Gilbert. He's less of an unreliable narrator and more of a "the narrator is full of bullshit". He's pretentious, pompous, and a completely self-involved egotist that views himself as supremely selfless and enlightened. He thinks his Japanese traveling companion is not Japanese enough and must be educated, so Gilbert lectures him about Japanese aesthetic, history, religion... Most of the time I'd not enjoy that type of protagonist but there was something in this that instead made me laugh. (Also, his Japanese companion that he keeps trying to prevent from committing suicide? His last name is Tamagotchi, which tickles me greatly.) Overall, while I enjoyed this book, I can definitely see how one could dislike or be annoyed by it.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A short, quirky and determinedly ambiguous novel that manages to be captivatingly deep and mournful at the same time as being delightfully superficial and funny. And a book that operates as much through symbols as it does through explicit narrative (stand by for a lot of hair and trees...). Poschmann is clearly a writer who doesn't trouble to switch off the "poet" side of herself when she's playing the role of a novelist.With - respectively - Basho's Narrow road to the deep north and The complete manual of suicide under their arms, Gilbert and Yosa, who have met by chance on the end of a station platform in Tokyo, set off on a modern version of the poet's pilgrimage to the pine islands of Matsushima. Both of them are at low points in their lives: Gilbert, who has been doing research (without very much conviction of its utility) into the iconography of beards in the cultural studies department of a German university, has run away from his breadwinner-wife after having a bad dream about her Medusa-like hair; Yosa, who even with a false beard doesn't manage to live up to his own ideal of Japanese masculinity, has decided to kill himself after becoming convinced that he has done badly in an exam. But, for a while at least, their respective failings complement each other and allow the two of them to form an uneasy team to navigate the strange world of modern Japan together.Poschmann enjoys herself using the cultural collisions involved in this unlikely setup to make fun of the odder and less defensible aspects of Japanese and European cultures (and, in passing, of some of our ideas about masculinity), but at the same time she draws European readers into an appreciation of some of the less obvious strengths of the Japanese way of looking at the world. A pilgrimage to look at a rock or a tree isn't as obvious a thing to do as a pilgrimage to look at a building or a great painting, particularly if we find the tree in the middle of a building site or a traffic island, but it isn't hard to see (when we look at it through her eyes) how it can also have value to us.Of course, the resulting book isn't a well-formed novel in a conventional western way - the explicit story doesn't come to a satisfactory resolution, and the situation isn't one that would bear rationalising - Gilbert's reasons for leaving his wife would seem flimsy even by the standards of Othello, and he seems to have learnt as much about Japan 24 hours after his unplanned arrival there as the author did after three months of intensive study, for instance. But that doesn't seem to matter: This is another of those books that make you want to plan a re-read as soon as you put them down.

[steve38 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A short, amusing, thoughtful and poetic novel. A german specialist in beard fashions argues with his wife, in a huff goes to the airport and buys a ticket on the first long haul flight available. To Tokyo. There he bumps into and befriends, well not really; or teams up with, no not that either, well he travels in tandem with a young man contemplating suicide. The journey turns into a contemplation of Japanese concepts of natural beauty in the wake of Saigyo and Basho. His young travelling companion possibly becomes a ghost. He sends emails to his wife who is annoyed but not as puzzled as you might hve thought by his long distance grump. And who would have thought beard fashions could be so interesting?

[baresi_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sehr gute Beschreibung und Beobachtung über den Alltag und Zwischenmenschlichen in Japan!