I will refrain from doing semantic exercises on the description "A True Story" as initiated by the movie Fargo. What happened then is not a story. It is true. A German physician and his patient move to Floreana in 1930, one of the Galápagos Islands with the sole intent of creating their own paradise, their own eden, far from the madness and obligations of society. Dr. Friedrich Ritter also has the high aspirations to write his own philosophical treatise about how to live in this world. He describes their new paradise in a series of newspaper articles, which of course leads to other people sharing his idea. They are followed by another German couple who are looking for a place where their ill and almost blind son, still a boy, can hope to benefit from a good environment. Next comes an Austrian-French sex-obsessed Baroness with two 'male slaves' and an Ecuadorian translator. The baroness is a true narcissist, self-obsessed, manipulative, dictatorial, charming if need be, seductive and commanding.
Because the media attention they create, they also generate the interest of the very rich Americans, who come to visit with their cruise ships to see for themselves how these Europeans have eked out a living in the harsh environment of the Galapagos.
Needless to say that this Eden soon becomes a nightmare for all involved, with the truth becoming a commodity as rare as luxury goods. Human nature comes to the fore even among the most principled people, leading to theft, hypocrisy, gossip, shifting alliances, hate, death and murder.
Kahler brings it like a documentary, extensively using excerpts from letters and articles, and literally including all events that took place, which gives possibly a very distorted view of the actual boring life these people must have had on the island, with the exception of the conflicts that were documented. The book has also no literary ambition to bring more than just a report. It's a missed opportunity with this kind of material to work from.
It's a fascinating microcosm of humanity, isolated and reduced to a handful of people. It could have been staged for a play, to reduce the madness of our kind on one tiny location, with high hopes and lofty aspirations leading to a predictable catastrophy within a very short time span. It's a mirror to all of us, and if a fiction author had developed a plot such as this one, the reader would say it's possibly too programmatic, too artificial to be credible.
In this sense it really is a story. But then a true one.
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