THE LOST ISLAND: Alone Among the Fruitful and Multiplying

Rising out of the southernmost Indian Ocean, halfway between Australia and Africa, is a tiny island, an extinct volcano, that is one of the most isolated places in the world. Named Amsterdam by a Dutch explorer in the 17th century, it is only six miles around and is now claimed by the French, who won't allow anyone to stay there to visit the island's weather station for more than two days. In this idiosyncratic memoir, van Cleef (The Lost World of the Berberovic Family ) gives a lengthy account of the years he spent wrangling with France's Department of Southern Lands in order to get permission to visit the island. He then tells of the three-week sea voyage to get there and his seven-week sojourn on the rocky protrusion, which has little to offer except punishing winds, treacherous marshes, furiously mating seals, and eccentric meteorologists and biologists, whom he identifies only by monikers such as "the Ascetic" and "the Dreamer." Van Cleef's descriptions of the island are clever, but the real fun is the subtle ways in which he uses his dry sense of humor to lampoon French bureaucrats, who, he implies, need any patch of land to help them maintain their shrinking sphere of influence in the world. Illus. not seen by PW . (Sept.)