Icaria is a Greek island that becomes one of Benno von Archimboldi’s temporary homes and a point of departure for several manuscripts sent to Bubis. Its rocky hills, distant sea, and small rented house frame a period of writing and movement among islands; the story of Sisyphus that Archimboldi tells from there turns the setting into a place where literary invention and the prospect of escape meet.

Setting and Arrival

Archimboldi rents a little house in the rocky hills of Icaria, with the sea in the distance. Bubis learns where the manuscript has come from and compares the island surroundings to the setting of Sisyphus’s final labors. His letter acknowledges receipt of the text and offers three forms of payment, leaving Archimboldi to choose which suits him.

The island is neither presented as a permanent home nor as a simple backdrop. Archimboldi stays there for a while, then moves among other islands, making Icaria the first named stop in a sequence of temporary residences. The narrative gives the setting its particular character through the contrast between the isolated house and the manuscripts that travel outward from it to Bubis.

Sisyphus in Archimboldi’s Letter

Archimboldi replies to Bubis with a version of Sisyphus’s escape from the underworld. In his telling, Sisyphus persuades his wife not to perform the customary funeral rites, anticipating that Death will come for him. Once in the underworld, he claims that his wife is responsible for the missing rites and asks permission to return to Earth to punish her. Hades grants him a limited leave, but Sisyphus takes advantage of the opening, lives to old age, and does not return until his body fails.

Archimboldi extends the story beyond that escape: the punishment of the rock, he suggests, may be intended to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from devising another scheme. Yet at an unexpected moment Sisyphus will invent a way to return to Earth. The story is not merely a mythic aside in the correspondence. Its cunning protagonist makes return seem like a recurring possibility, while the exchange itself shows Archimboldi using a publisher’s routine business letter as an occasion for imaginative play.

Books Sent from the Island

The manuscript Archimboldi sends from Icaria is titled The Blind Woman. It concerns a blind woman unaware of her blindness and clairvoyant detectives unaware of their clairvoyance, a paired irony in which both subjects lack knowledge of the capacity that defines them. The island is thus connected not only to the author’s physical retreat but to a work organized around limited perception and mistaken self-understanding.

Other books soon reach Hamburg from the island. The Black Sea is a play, or a novel in dramatic form, in which the Black Sea speaks with the Atlantic Ocean before dawn. Lethaea relocates a classical transformation story to Nazi Germany; after a successful court case, it becomes Archimboldi’s first book to go through five printings. The island period also yields The Lottery Man, about a disabled German who sells lottery tickets in New York, and The Father, in which a son recalls his father’s career as a psychopathic killer, beginning in 1938 and ending enigmatically in 1948. These distinct works show the breadth of the manuscripts associated with Archimboldi’s island life, from dramatic form and classical myth to crime and family memory.

A Temporary Home in an Itinerant Life

After Icaria, Archimboldi lives on Amorgos and Santorini, then on Sifnos, Syros, and Mykonos. He later stays on a tiny island near Naxos that he calls Hecatombe or Superego, while never living on Naxos itself. The precise sequence makes residence provisional: islands are named and left behind rather than gathered into a single settled home.

The narrative gives a concrete account of this island life through what Archimboldi eats and does. He eats grapes, olives, cheeses wrapped in grape leaves, hard black bread softened with wine, fish, tomatoes, and figs; he draws water from a well with a bucket and an army-style jerry can. He swims and sometimes dives, though the seaweed boy is dead, and at other times sits alone on scrub-covered hills until dusk or dawn. The account closes off any certainty about inward reflection: he claims to be thinking, but the narration says he is really thinking nothing at all. Icaria’s significance lies in this tension between the productive writer whose books leave the island and the solitary traveler whose stays remain temporary and whose thoughts resist explanation.