On the Sponge Islands: Loss and Restoration in the Aegean

A visit to paradise turns into a multiyear quest to investigate a massive ecological collapse in this immersive travelogue. South African literary scholar Martin (A Millimetre of Dust) “knew hardly anything” about the Dodecanese islands in Greece when she arrived for a 2017 sabbatical. But during her stay, she came to see the murky history of the sponge-diving industry as a gaping mystery at the center of daily life. Journeying to the most prominent of the islands—Rhodes, Symi, Kaymnos, and Patmos—she became acquainted with loquacious elders who offered handed-down recollections of the booming turn-of-the-20th-century industry. Piecing them together, Martin relates how the steady income enjoyed by traditional sponge divers, who dove naked, exploded into an “unimagined bounty” with the 1860s introduction of the diving suit. Merchants and captains grew wealthy even as the divers referred to the new technology as “Satan’s Machine” because “it killed people or disabled them for life.” The author mixes this story with her own observations of the region’s sunkissed charms, as well as its more ominous signs of decrepitude, cruelty, and inner turmoil. These include barren orchards, animal neglect, and residents’ steadfast denial that the islands’ ecological collapse resulted from sponge overharvesting; they instead truck in conspiracy theories, blaming outlandish culprits like radiation from Chernobyl. It adds up to a rich, unsettling “object lesson” in manmade disaster. (May)