In the middle of the Caribbean, there sits a small island called Redonda. But what at first appears to be an uninhabited rock turns out to also be the site of a fragmented, fiercely contested kingdom that dates back more than a century--a kingdom of writers, with little in common besides their shared allegiance to the Redondan throne. Now, Michael Hingston has assembled this unbelievable true story for the first time.
... a wonderfully entertaining book ... Hingston relates all this whimsy, with abundant anecdotes, in the manner of A.J.A. Symons’s 1934 classic, The Quest for Corvo, which transformed writing a biography into an intensely personal adventure ... Hingston’s quest reaches its inevitable climax when he travels to the actual Redonda on a mini-expedition that devolves into frivolity, confusion, exhaustion and near-disaster. How could it be otherwise? What really matters isn’t the island itself, but the idea of this literary Neverland, this magic kingdom of the imagination.
... enthralling and delightfully odd ... The book is either a cautionary tale about literary obsession or a gleeful exploration of bibliophilic fetishism, depending on how you read it ... Along the way, Hingston also builds an often transfixing, frequently head-shaking history of the micronation and its royals ... That spirit, the tongue-in-cheek mock seriousness of the whole endeavour, and the playfulness of its participants, is a keen factor in Try Not to Be Strange. The book is a delightful reading experience, utterly unexpected and unlike anything you are likely to read this year. Hingston cannily balances between writerly fidelity to the truth and the sheer absurdity he so often finds.
... a passionate and skilfully written exploration of an extraordinary world and those who search for such places to get to the heart of what stories really mean. Hingston’s thirst for deeper knowledge is palpable, and it illuminates what the kingdom might really stand for.
