Eden Undone

Starred review from August 1, 2024
Kahler (the author of previous books, including Sin in the Second City (2008) and The Ghosts of Eden Park (2019), under the name Karen Abbott) has a gift for writing gripping histories that are both sensational and thoroughly documented. Possibly her wildest book yet, Eden Undone tells the little-known story of a small group of European immigrants who settled on a bucolic deserted island in the Galapagos in the 1930s. An idealistic, Nietzsche-obsessed doctor set up house with a young woman at first content to be his acolyte. A more practical German couple followed--a man and woman who left their spouses behind but brought her adolescent son--and then an erratic baroness arrived with a revolving cast of younger lovers. The book opens with a description of two bodies found by sailors on a nearby island and then sucks the reader in with soap opera and scandal before revealing the identities of the deceased. Kahler's subjects were handy with a pen, so she works with ample details about daily life, uncomfortable interactions, and conflicting narratives to be untangled. References to the Depression and Hitler's growing influence in Germany amplify the sense that this little society represented a microcosm of social breakdown in the larger world.

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September 1, 2024
Strangers in paradise. Kahler (aka Karen Abbott), host of the podcastRemus: The Mad Bootleg King, biographer of famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, and chronicler of sin and scoundrels, briskly recounts the mysterious history of the small Galapagos island, Floreana. Drawing on diaries, letters, and news reports, Kahler follows the fortunes and misfortunes of a handful of eccentric Europeans who settled on the island, beginning in 1929, sharing the fervent desire "to create a utopia, although each of them had different visions as to what a utopia might be." First to arrive were Dr. Friedrich Ritter, a narcissistic German physician, and his patient Dore Strauch, who left their respective spouses with the plan "to live a life of contemplation, of mutual love and simple work with natural things." But news reports about their endeavor turned the "Modern Adam and Eve" into the objects of such sensational publicity that others followed. Some--journalists, scientists, and wealthy Americans eager to see exotic wildlife--made brief recurring visits; among those who stayed, intruding on the couple's life of contemplation, were a German war veteran, his pregnant lover, and his sickly teenage son and the rapacious Baroness Wagner, accompanied by two lovers, who planned to build a luxury hotel. "My companion and I cannot but laugh at the 'Galapagos psychosis' which is reported to have broken out in Germany," Ritter wrote. "It is the result of entirely wrong notions of our so-called paradise." Life on the island was physically challenging for all of them; Friedrich, notably, was "an absolute dilettante in terms of survival skills." But equally challenging was a deepening atmosphere of hostility and distrust: Friedrich's cruelty toward Dore; the Baroness' viciousness, greed, and betrayal; and the eruption of violent rages--leading, Kahler reveals, very likely to murder. A spirited page-turner.

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