What do you think?
Rate this book
The Optician of Lampedusa
From an award-winning BBC journalist, this moving book turns the testimony of an accidental hero into a timeless story about the awakening of human courage and conscience. 'I can hardly begin to describe to you what I saw as our boat approached the source of that terrible noise. I hardly want to. You won't understand because you weren't there. You can't understand. You see, I thought I'd heard seagulls screeching. Seagulls fighting over a lucky catch. Birds. Just birds.' Emma-Jane Kirby has reported extensively on the reality of mass migration today. In The Optician of Lampedusa she brings to life the moving testimony of an ordinary man whose late summer boat trip off a Sicilian island unexpectedly turns into a tragic rescue mission.
117 pages, Hardcover
First published September 29, 2016
About the author
Emma Jane Kirby
1 book16 followersEmma Jane Kirby is a reporter for the BBC, where she has worked as a foreign correspondent since 2001. She is currently a reporter with BBC Radio 4’s The World at One. For the last two years, much of her time has been spent on the migration trail. In 2015, she was awarded the Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents for her reporting on the Lampedusa disaster. A graduate of Oxford, she lives in London and Paris.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 215 reviews
January 28, 2023
This is moving account of a group of friends, while out for a day on their boat at sea in late summer come across the unimaginable. A late summer dry trip turns into a heart breaking rescue mission when a boat carrying hundreds of refugees capsizes.
This is a relatively short book based on a real life tragedy. I cant imagine what it was like for the day trippers to come across such a heart breaking tragedy. However I just didn't find this well written. It felt more like an article I would read online. I should have felt the emotion of the rescuers and the rescued but I didn't. I wanted to connect with the survivors and their families but I didn’t.
However it does make you think and I have since researched online to try and understand more why this is still allowed to happen when so many heads of state could put a plan in place and protect people who are fleeing from desperate situations.
I am glad I read it but not one for my favourites shelf
This is a relatively short book based on a real life tragedy. I cant imagine what it was like for the day trippers to come across such a heart breaking tragedy. However I just didn't find this well written. It felt more like an article I would read online. I should have felt the emotion of the rescuers and the rescued but I didn't. I wanted to connect with the survivors and their families but I didn’t.
However it does make you think and I have since researched online to try and understand more why this is still allowed to happen when so many heads of state could put a plan in place and protect people who are fleeing from desperate situations.
I am glad I read it but not one for my favourites shelf
December 5, 2016
The most important book I read this year. I did cry all the way through it, but I am glad I read it.
June 12, 2017
This is a story that needs to be told, but I just don't feel it was told that well in terms of story, character or writing. Not one for me.
November 5, 2016
Just. Wow.
What a powerful account.
This book stunned me into silence.
For one so small, it swells tears with words, its paragraphs pull punches & each chapter is a slap in the face to the reality we've become accustomed & numbed to.
It made my jaw slack & my insides twist - we're all guilty of looking the other way like the Optician initially does (with the call for charity donations), but we have to hope, or we have to change, so that we're the one, in whatever way we can, being those helping hands.
This also serves a poignant reminder of the truth & humanity in all this, what the Mr Abate's of this world can't fathom in their cruel little minds & cold hearts, that for a migrant, there isn't choice, that that risk is actually better than what they're currently subjected to.
That's what hurts. But it should do!
And the images in this book do that far better than any news report, but they also beautifully convey the human spirit within the saviours, the saved...& the lost...
We can't always do as much as we'd like, but just by buying this book that's something, especially at places where they donate to charity - read & inform yourselves, change your perspective for the better - SHARE THIS STORY.
What a powerful account.
This book stunned me into silence.
For one so small, it swells tears with words, its paragraphs pull punches & each chapter is a slap in the face to the reality we've become accustomed & numbed to.
It made my jaw slack & my insides twist - we're all guilty of looking the other way like the Optician initially does (with the call for charity donations), but we have to hope, or we have to change, so that we're the one, in whatever way we can, being those helping hands.
This also serves a poignant reminder of the truth & humanity in all this, what the Mr Abate's of this world can't fathom in their cruel little minds & cold hearts, that for a migrant, there isn't choice, that that risk is actually better than what they're currently subjected to.
That's what hurts. But it should do!
And the images in this book do that far better than any news report, but they also beautifully convey the human spirit within the saviours, the saved...& the lost...
We can't always do as much as we'd like, but just by buying this book that's something, especially at places where they donate to charity - read & inform yourselves, change your perspective for the better - SHARE THIS STORY.
July 22, 2021
Sheer hypocrisy. In the title as throughout the story, the focus is on how the optician feels when he rescues migrants, how he and his friends keep having nightmares for what they saw and went through, it is all based on how THEY feel awful and indignant after their terrible experience. When, actually, the relevant point of view is the perspective of the migrants, of the survivors. Who cares about the optician’s nightmares if the migrants are who lived the authentic trauma?
Again, another story based on a good European who is praised for helping migrants when it should be the least one can do.
I know that the book would like to give voice to such a horrible ongoing tragedy, however still it is narrated from an Eurocentric perspective.
Again, another story based on a good European who is praised for helping migrants when it should be the least one can do.
I know that the book would like to give voice to such a horrible ongoing tragedy, however still it is narrated from an Eurocentric perspective.
November 9, 2016
A deeply upsetting read, that is 100% relevant. Anyone who thinks they understand the human element of the current refugee crisis should read this as soon as they can. This is not an issue of any bulls**t reclamation of a nation, or any other fascist c**p that seems to be being spouted currently, this is a human issue with real human suffering at it's core. I urge anyone and everyone to read this book now. I also urge people in the UK to go and buy a copy from their local Waterstones, or from the Waterstones website; throughout November every copy sold by Waterstones will result in a donation of £5 being given to Oxfam so that they can continue to provide aid and assistance to the people caught up in this most horrific of problems.
June 3, 2024
Some very clunky and awkward sentences hold this book back. I also thought the opening act - before the tragedy dragged on for 20 pages longer than it had to. The purpose of the opening was to establish The Optician as a true everyman, but it could have done that purpose without boring me to death. For a book barely over 100 pages, its not a compliment to say parts of it dragged.
That being said, the depiction of the tragedy and the emotional roller-coaster The Optician goes through during and after the rescue operation was harrowing. Knowing that this was a true story brings it to the next level.
The message of the story is summed up:
"[The Migrants] had waved in the water, yes, but they had also waved from the reception centre, from the church steps and from the roadside where he had jogged past them, blindly. They had waved from the newspaper columns and from the television screens where he had filtered them out and switched them off. They had always been in his line of vision and he had chosen not to see them."
The Optician's boat was apparently the second boat on the scene. The first party to discover the drowning migrants had decided to ignore them. I'm not sure if it was ever discovered who the people in this boat were. I was hoping the book would go into more details about that - or address it in some way.
That being said, the depiction of the tragedy and the emotional roller-coaster The Optician goes through during and after the rescue operation was harrowing. Knowing that this was a true story brings it to the next level.
The message of the story is summed up:
"[The Migrants] had waved in the water, yes, but they had also waved from the reception centre, from the church steps and from the roadside where he had jogged past them, blindly. They had waved from the newspaper columns and from the television screens where he had filtered them out and switched them off. They had always been in his line of vision and he had chosen not to see them."
The Optician's boat was apparently the second boat on the scene. The first party to discover the drowning migrants had decided to ignore them. I'm not sure if it was ever discovered who the people in this boat were. I was hoping the book would go into more details about that - or address it in some way.
August 16, 2023
The subject matter of this book could’ve had me wailing - true story of eight friends on a fishing trip who woke to the sound of what they thought we screeching seagulls, only to notice upon closer inspection it was the sounds of hundreds of refugees drowning. I don’t know why but the book fell flat for me. I enjoyed the writing style but something was missing. You want to be totally engrossed in a book, almost as though you are the main character in your minds eye. But for this one, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t feel the feels I should have been feeling. Sorry lampedussy 🥺
November 6, 2016
This book was a pretty bland reading experience and I think that's because I was expecting, either, a more non-fiction style recounting of the event and its political backdrop, or a first-person account from the journalist's perspective in interviewing him. Instead, the style comes across as The Optician of Lampedusa: the Novelization.
Which I think is fine. I understand why it is that way: it makes his story into A Story and focuses on human emotions above all else, in a situation when we're often only given the cold facts and it's easy for people to avoid empathising. The book has a raison d'etre beyond being a good read. But it wasn't a good read. Which is a shame, because I thought I would enjoy it, and I was looking forward to reading a book about the refugee crisis.
Which I think is fine. I understand why it is that way: it makes his story into A Story and focuses on human emotions above all else, in a situation when we're often only given the cold facts and it's easy for people to avoid empathising. The book has a raison d'etre beyond being a good read. But it wasn't a good read. Which is a shame, because I thought I would enjoy it, and I was looking forward to reading a book about the refugee crisis.
July 1, 2021
An absolutely heartbreaking story. Emma Kirby retells the 2013 migrant tragedy from the perspective of the optician of Lampedusa both poignantly and powerfully. This incredibly eye opening and thought provoking read would be a great addition to school curriculums
March 3, 2020
A true story written by a BBC reporter trying - in any way possible - to draw attention to something the lucky only care about if it inconveniences them: huge numbers of our fellow humans currently* dying in desperate, dangerous, flailing attempts to reach livable situations, habitable countries.
This Normal Italian Optician goes for a sail with his wife and 6 others at the end of the summer. Sweet.
Not when the gulls crying aren’t gulls but hundreds of drowning Eritreans - less than a km off the coast of his home. They manage to save 47 people, all but one of them males. The remaining almost 300 people died.
For this man, his wife and 6 friends, what had been an abstraction - perhaps even a bother - suddenly became the most intense human moments of their lives.
He lived acute human misery in the eyes, held it in his hands, felt the desperation of life lost and barely saved against his chest, the burning tears that never stop. And because his heart was open, he was changed.
What would the world be like if folks could “get it” without developing PTSD (which of course he and his wife and friends did)?
Prior to this day:
“He had always been a man who had been confident about where he was going, a man sure of himself and his decisions.”
I have always thought of this as the Invictus conceit of the Euro/US white man. My father (who I adore/d) had a severe case of this.
“I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul”
Yeah, maybe, a little, if you are rich and powerful, you can pretend that.
But it is a delusion only allowed those cis white men, womb lottery winners, who believe that they are in control, in direct contradistinction to the fact that the earth is a speck of random matter crashing through space only held in tenuous orbit by the physical pull of a star that will die as assuredly as we will.
News flash Big Guys: whether taken down by the shift of a tectonic plate or the change in a viral nucleoid, you will be outta here: Zuck, Bezos, Bloomberg - Trump, Boris J - you could stop the pain. See below.
The Optician “...he’d...had his own moments of pain, but he had had no idea that such profound depths of sorrow existed. He could never imagine feeling such an acute sadness again.”
Later (that day?) the police diver found the body of a young woman wedged into the prow of the ship, clutching a bundle of rags. When the rags were pulled from her, the cloth had fallen away to reveal a tiny baby boy, still attached to his mother by the umbilical cord.
And the Optician, realizing his naiveté, thought “there would always be greater sorrow, deeper and more unfathomable than any of us could ever imagine.”
Beautifully written. And true. But that sorrow does not need to be so inevitably wide and huge and deep and endlessly long and spread across continents and peoples who were never to blame.
There are those who have the power and the resources to make it so much better, or in some cases even make it stop. No cages for children on the southern border of the USA? Easy peasy!
“The myopic world was a softer one”
What a ripping line for an optician!
Selective Myopia.
Isn’t that why so many people in wealthy countries, imagining themselves (ourselves) worthy of comfortable lives, choose to ignore the majority of the world who live and die in struggle and discomfort?
But, really, who wants to look farther than they need to? I mean beyond the closest Dunkin Donuts? Perhaps that’s why MediCare & MediCaid don’t provide vision coverage.
(I am particularly snarky today. If Bernie doesn't win, i may snark myself into oblivion.)
A misanthropically myopic character the Optician must serve in his clinic / shop is an Italian pissed about the “migrants” effect on business: Not our problem. What’s it got to do with us?
“What have any of these people got to do with us?”
It becomes so much harder to tolerate the hateful once you know. Once the Optician knows. Once he had held "these people" to his chest. After he has cried without end with "these people" about all of our lost babies.
“It was just that sometimes he wished that his head could be still again, the way it had been before they took the boat trip.”
Before he knew.
*************
*(Today, 2 March 2020, Greek soldiers killed two migrants and wounded a third, to prevent their entry - and a child died when an overstuffed boat overturned trying to reach a Greek island.)
This Normal Italian Optician goes for a sail with his wife and 6 others at the end of the summer. Sweet.
Not when the gulls crying aren’t gulls but hundreds of drowning Eritreans - less than a km off the coast of his home. They manage to save 47 people, all but one of them males. The remaining almost 300 people died.
For this man, his wife and 6 friends, what had been an abstraction - perhaps even a bother - suddenly became the most intense human moments of their lives.
He lived acute human misery in the eyes, held it in his hands, felt the desperation of life lost and barely saved against his chest, the burning tears that never stop. And because his heart was open, he was changed.
What would the world be like if folks could “get it” without developing PTSD (which of course he and his wife and friends did)?
Prior to this day:
“He had always been a man who had been confident about where he was going, a man sure of himself and his decisions.”
I have always thought of this as the Invictus conceit of the Euro/US white man. My father (who I adore/d) had a severe case of this.
“I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul”
Yeah, maybe, a little, if you are rich and powerful, you can pretend that.
But it is a delusion only allowed those cis white men, womb lottery winners, who believe that they are in control, in direct contradistinction to the fact that the earth is a speck of random matter crashing through space only held in tenuous orbit by the physical pull of a star that will die as assuredly as we will.
News flash Big Guys: whether taken down by the shift of a tectonic plate or the change in a viral nucleoid, you will be outta here: Zuck, Bezos, Bloomberg - Trump, Boris J - you could stop the pain. See below.
The Optician “...he’d...had his own moments of pain, but he had had no idea that such profound depths of sorrow existed. He could never imagine feeling such an acute sadness again.”
Later (that day?) the police diver found the body of a young woman wedged into the prow of the ship, clutching a bundle of rags. When the rags were pulled from her, the cloth had fallen away to reveal a tiny baby boy, still attached to his mother by the umbilical cord.
And the Optician, realizing his naiveté, thought “there would always be greater sorrow, deeper and more unfathomable than any of us could ever imagine.”
Beautifully written. And true. But that sorrow does not need to be so inevitably wide and huge and deep and endlessly long and spread across continents and peoples who were never to blame.
There are those who have the power and the resources to make it so much better, or in some cases even make it stop. No cages for children on the southern border of the USA? Easy peasy!
“The myopic world was a softer one”
What a ripping line for an optician!
Selective Myopia.
Isn’t that why so many people in wealthy countries, imagining themselves (ourselves) worthy of comfortable lives, choose to ignore the majority of the world who live and die in struggle and discomfort?
But, really, who wants to look farther than they need to? I mean beyond the closest Dunkin Donuts? Perhaps that’s why MediCare & MediCaid don’t provide vision coverage.
(I am particularly snarky today. If Bernie doesn't win, i may snark myself into oblivion.)
A misanthropically myopic character the Optician must serve in his clinic / shop is an Italian pissed about the “migrants” effect on business: Not our problem. What’s it got to do with us?
“What have any of these people got to do with us?”
It becomes so much harder to tolerate the hateful once you know. Once the Optician knows. Once he had held "these people" to his chest. After he has cried without end with "these people" about all of our lost babies.
“It was just that sometimes he wished that his head could be still again, the way it had been before they took the boat trip.”
Before he knew.
*************
*(Today, 2 March 2020, Greek soldiers killed two migrants and wounded a third, to prevent their entry - and a child died when an overstuffed boat overturned trying to reach a Greek island.)
July 20, 2023
A short book calls for a short summary. The Optician of Lampedusa follows the first hand account of that very man, The Optician of Lampedusa, as he and seven other Italians happen upon a capsized migrant ship with hundreds of migrants drowning in the water. They rescue all they could on their very small boat, but only a fraction of the migrants could be saved, with the vast majority of them drowning. The rest of the book focuses on The Optician, his wife, and his six friends as they have a Very Hard Time with reconciling the massive tragedy of over 200 migrants that they were unable to save. It touches on tensions with European and Italian policies and the callous attitudes towards migrants from those who do not have to face them directly.
This book was written by Emma-Jane Kirby, a BBC reporter, and is a novelized version of actual events in 2013 where an optician, Carmine Menna, rescued many migrants from a capsized boat off the Italian coast.
This is one of those books that I find difficult to review because of the difference in my opinions on how well it was written and my feelings towards the story. The writing was fine. Simple and straightforward. No nonsense, nothing remarkable. The dialogue was a bit stilted and artificial but I can't blame a reporter for not having a good handle on writing dialogue. It certainly wasn't bad.
But from cover to cover, I simply could not get past the question of "who is this for?", and as I continued reading, I got more and more frustrated. This is an event that actually happened, and mirrors similar events that continue to happen to this day. This is an important story that should absolutely be told and awareness brought to it, but for the life of me, I cannot understand why the author believed it was a good idea to center the story on the rescuers rather than the migrants.
Maybe this is a bitter, but this is exactly the kind of thing I would expect from a BBC reporter. Centering the experiences of the rich Europeans and how this awful tragedy made them oh so sad rather than centering on the migrants is tone deaf at best and completely callous at worst. De-centering the experience of the migrants is EXACTLY what drove the tension of the book! The poor Europeans were upset that they couldn't help more people and had difficulties dealing with the fact that the migrants weren't being treated like people. And in this story, the migrants were relegated to side characters! It feels so intentionally tactless, I cannot believe it was not done on purpose. How can the central theme of the book be so heavy handed while the book itself stands as a monument to the very thing it is trying to decry?
So I return to the question: who is this book for? What reasonable person who does not care about the lives of migrants will have their mind changed after reading about how privileged Italians got sad after rescuing them? What good is this story doing? Don't read this.
This book was written by Emma-Jane Kirby, a BBC reporter, and is a novelized version of actual events in 2013 where an optician, Carmine Menna, rescued many migrants from a capsized boat off the Italian coast.
This is one of those books that I find difficult to review because of the difference in my opinions on how well it was written and my feelings towards the story. The writing was fine. Simple and straightforward. No nonsense, nothing remarkable. The dialogue was a bit stilted and artificial but I can't blame a reporter for not having a good handle on writing dialogue. It certainly wasn't bad.
But from cover to cover, I simply could not get past the question of "who is this for?", and as I continued reading, I got more and more frustrated. This is an event that actually happened, and mirrors similar events that continue to happen to this day. This is an important story that should absolutely be told and awareness brought to it, but for the life of me, I cannot understand why the author believed it was a good idea to center the story on the rescuers rather than the migrants.
Maybe this is a bitter, but this is exactly the kind of thing I would expect from a BBC reporter. Centering the experiences of the rich Europeans and how this awful tragedy made them oh so sad rather than centering on the migrants is tone deaf at best and completely callous at worst. De-centering the experience of the migrants is EXACTLY what drove the tension of the book! The poor Europeans were upset that they couldn't help more people and had difficulties dealing with the fact that the migrants weren't being treated like people. And in this story, the migrants were relegated to side characters! It feels so intentionally tactless, I cannot believe it was not done on purpose. How can the central theme of the book be so heavy handed while the book itself stands as a monument to the very thing it is trying to decry?
So I return to the question: who is this book for? What reasonable person who does not care about the lives of migrants will have their mind changed after reading about how privileged Italians got sad after rescuing them? What good is this story doing? Don't read this.
November 11, 2016
"He could not ignore the fact that the waving hands had always been visible to him. They had waved in the water, yes, but they had also waved from the reception centre, from the church steps and from the roadside where he had jogged past them, blindly. They had waved from the newspaper columns and from the television screens where he had filtered them out and switched them off. They had always been in his line of vision and he had chosen not to see them."
"On the way home, he crossed over the road to pause at the migrant boat graveyard where a flotilla of wooden cadavers lay marooned on the gravel, their hulls splintered with unsightly wounds. The worn-out vessels were lying heavily on their sides as if in a gesture of surrender. He winced as he looked at them. For how many years now had desperate people washed up here, drained of every last drop of their strength? He clenched his jaw. And how many more smashed wrecks would it take before Europe stopped debating and instead agreed to do something?"
"On the way home, he crossed over the road to pause at the migrant boat graveyard where a flotilla of wooden cadavers lay marooned on the gravel, their hulls splintered with unsightly wounds. The worn-out vessels were lying heavily on their sides as if in a gesture of surrender. He winced as he looked at them. For how many years now had desperate people washed up here, drained of every last drop of their strength? He clenched his jaw. And how many more smashed wrecks would it take before Europe stopped debating and instead agreed to do something?"
June 4, 2017
> “How naive he’d been, thought the optician, how naive. Because there would always be greater sorrow, deeper and more unfathomable than any of us could ever imagine.” (p. 83)
Bad things happen all the time. Suffering is a feature of life for many people. When this suffering happens on our doorstep, an initial flurry of interest is followed by a long steady wane as what was the extraordinary becomes routine. So it is with the boatloads of people making their way towards Europe. For a brief moment, Europe seemed to care. The passage of time saw even these tragic stories become absorbed into the fabric of ‘normal life’.
Emma Jane Kirby’s book, The Optician of Lampedusa hits the pause button on our collective forgetting. This is an Italian optician’s story, a short tale of his coming into contact with the raw human tragedy occurring with regularity on Europe’s southern shores. The optician is sailing with friends when he comes across hundreds of drowning Eritreans (among others). The book chronicles the moments before, during and after their rescue.
Kirby’s strength is to stick to detailed observations, relaying what was going through the Italian optician’s mind, what he was seeing and hearing. It (re)connects the reader with the unvarnished reality of those being smuggled into Europe. It’s a unique account in its directness, and was a sober reminder of something that I had started to forget.
If I have one criticism of the book, it is the perspective. I would far rather have read a book by one of the survivors, or at least to hear the story in their words. I understand that European publishers feel like they need a white face to relay the stories of ‘the other’, I just wish it wasn’t the case. Nevertheless, this was a sensitively portrayed account and one I will be recommending to friends and family.
Bad things happen all the time. Suffering is a feature of life for many people. When this suffering happens on our doorstep, an initial flurry of interest is followed by a long steady wane as what was the extraordinary becomes routine. So it is with the boatloads of people making their way towards Europe. For a brief moment, Europe seemed to care. The passage of time saw even these tragic stories become absorbed into the fabric of ‘normal life’.
Emma Jane Kirby’s book, The Optician of Lampedusa hits the pause button on our collective forgetting. This is an Italian optician’s story, a short tale of his coming into contact with the raw human tragedy occurring with regularity on Europe’s southern shores. The optician is sailing with friends when he comes across hundreds of drowning Eritreans (among others). The book chronicles the moments before, during and after their rescue.
Kirby’s strength is to stick to detailed observations, relaying what was going through the Italian optician’s mind, what he was seeing and hearing. It (re)connects the reader with the unvarnished reality of those being smuggled into Europe. It’s a unique account in its directness, and was a sober reminder of something that I had started to forget.
If I have one criticism of the book, it is the perspective. I would far rather have read a book by one of the survivors, or at least to hear the story in their words. I understand that European publishers feel like they need a white face to relay the stories of ‘the other’, I just wish it wasn’t the case. Nevertheless, this was a sensitively portrayed account and one I will be recommending to friends and family.
May 31, 2021
This book was so heartbreaking but so important, would recommend to anyone.
December 11, 2016
I'm so grateful to Waterstones for including this marvelous little book in their 6 best books of 2016 list, otherwise who knows when I'd have come across it.
"He could not ignore the fact that the waving hands had always been visible to him. They had waved in the water, yes, but they had also waved from the reception centre, from the church steps and from the roadside where he had jogged past them, blindly. They had waved from the newspaper columns and from the television screens where he had filtered them out and switched them off. They had always been in his line of vision and he had chosen not to see them."
The Optician of Lampedusa is one of the most moving, eye-opening books I have ever read. It made me feel so guilty and cold, it constantly made me cry my eyes out. But that's the point!
This novella outlines everything that is wrong with Europe's lack of humanitarianism and its refugee policy, through the account of the true story of a group of friends who chose to spend a night at sea in late October 2013, and who wake up to a nightmarish sound they first believed to be the screeching of seagulls.
'I thought I'd heard seagulls screeching. Seagulls fighting over a lucky catch. Birds. Just birds.'
The horrible sound turns out to be the cries for help of the few people who had survived the sinking of one of those flimsy ships attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Lybia, with a load of 500+ migrants onboard.
The optician and his friends manage to save 47 of them with a boat that was built for carrying a maximum of 10, before they are stopped by the coast guard and have to go back to shore.
'They were all drowning. I thought: how do I save them all? I can still feel the fingers of the first hand I seized. How they clamped down with such a grip that I saw the sinuous veins of the wrist pounding. The force of that hold! My hand in a stranger's hand, in a bond stronger and more intimate than an umbilical cord. And my whole body shaking with the force of the hold as I pulled upwards and dragged the naked torso from the waves.'
The narrative follows the Optician (who is given no name, and thus, he could be any one of us) for a year, during which we get to witness the psichological and emotional impact the events have had on the group of friends, and we also get to know more or less, what became of the 47 people they saved, and how the lives of the rescuers and the rescued become linked in a bond of mutual love.
The Optician's real name is Carmine Menna, and his story serves to shake a desensitized public (myself included really), who has become accostumed to hearing about boats sinking and hundreds of migrants dying on an everyday basis, in order to make us aware again that they are more than numbers, they are people just like you and me, and they deserve to be saved and they deserve to be helped, because their only fault is going in search of a better life. Don't we all relate to that?
'Thirteen thousand asylum-seekers had arrived in Italy so far this year - Gabriele had told them that when he'd come to fetch them in the car to take them to the aircraft hangar. Until now it had just been a random, meaningless figure, an empty statistic. Yet here they were before them, flesh and blood, bone and gristle, with the salt of their tears mingling with their own. Boys with names that sounded like music, men whose hearts thumped with life and promise. Names not numers! Names!'
'He forced himself to look at the forlorn survivors. They would have visualized only positive things for their new life in the place they thought was Paradise. Everything was to be fresh and exciting in Europe and they would have expected only laughter and jobs, safe homes and freedom. [..] He squeezed his eyes shut to try to stop the tears. He felt useless. Yes, he had saved them, but for what kind of future? [..] No one had told them that in Europe, in Paradise, people also suffered and were wretched.'
"He could not ignore the fact that the waving hands had always been visible to him. They had waved in the water, yes, but they had also waved from the reception centre, from the church steps and from the roadside where he had jogged past them, blindly. They had waved from the newspaper columns and from the television screens where he had filtered them out and switched them off. They had always been in his line of vision and he had chosen not to see them."
The Optician of Lampedusa is one of the most moving, eye-opening books I have ever read. It made me feel so guilty and cold, it constantly made me cry my eyes out. But that's the point!
This novella outlines everything that is wrong with Europe's lack of humanitarianism and its refugee policy, through the account of the true story of a group of friends who chose to spend a night at sea in late October 2013, and who wake up to a nightmarish sound they first believed to be the screeching of seagulls.
'I thought I'd heard seagulls screeching. Seagulls fighting over a lucky catch. Birds. Just birds.'
The horrible sound turns out to be the cries for help of the few people who had survived the sinking of one of those flimsy ships attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Lybia, with a load of 500+ migrants onboard.
The optician and his friends manage to save 47 of them with a boat that was built for carrying a maximum of 10, before they are stopped by the coast guard and have to go back to shore.
'They were all drowning. I thought: how do I save them all? I can still feel the fingers of the first hand I seized. How they clamped down with such a grip that I saw the sinuous veins of the wrist pounding. The force of that hold! My hand in a stranger's hand, in a bond stronger and more intimate than an umbilical cord. And my whole body shaking with the force of the hold as I pulled upwards and dragged the naked torso from the waves.'
The narrative follows the Optician (who is given no name, and thus, he could be any one of us) for a year, during which we get to witness the psichological and emotional impact the events have had on the group of friends, and we also get to know more or less, what became of the 47 people they saved, and how the lives of the rescuers and the rescued become linked in a bond of mutual love.
The Optician's real name is Carmine Menna, and his story serves to shake a desensitized public (myself included really), who has become accostumed to hearing about boats sinking and hundreds of migrants dying on an everyday basis, in order to make us aware again that they are more than numbers, they are people just like you and me, and they deserve to be saved and they deserve to be helped, because their only fault is going in search of a better life. Don't we all relate to that?
'Thirteen thousand asylum-seekers had arrived in Italy so far this year - Gabriele had told them that when he'd come to fetch them in the car to take them to the aircraft hangar. Until now it had just been a random, meaningless figure, an empty statistic. Yet here they were before them, flesh and blood, bone and gristle, with the salt of their tears mingling with their own. Boys with names that sounded like music, men whose hearts thumped with life and promise. Names not numers! Names!'
'He forced himself to look at the forlorn survivors. They would have visualized only positive things for their new life in the place they thought was Paradise. Everything was to be fresh and exciting in Europe and they would have expected only laughter and jobs, safe homes and freedom. [..] He squeezed his eyes shut to try to stop the tears. He felt useless. Yes, he had saved them, but for what kind of future? [..] No one had told them that in Europe, in Paradise, people also suffered and were wretched.'
April 16, 2017
If you’re like me, then you’ve never heard of Lampedusa. It’s a tiny island with a huge problem. Every year, thousands of refugees fleeing Africa wash up on its shores.
The Optician of Lampedusa is written by BBC reporter Emma Jane Kirby. She tells the true story of Lampedusa’s only optician and the day that changed his life forever. In October of 2013, the optician and seven of his friends were on a boating trip in the Mediterranean when they heard a strange noise. They steered their boat toward the noise and discovered hundreds of people drowning in the waves.
The strange noise was people screaming. A boat full of refugees had sunk. The optician and his friends managed to pull 47 people out of the ocean. Before this event, the optician had never given much thought to the refugee crisis, but after he pulled the people from the water, he became desperate to know what happens to the refugees after they leave Lampedusa.
This tiny book (fewer than 200 pages) is an important read, but it’s not an easy one. Aside from the graphic scenes of drowning, it’s difficult to read because the optician is so relatable. He sees refugees every day, but he doesn’t know much about them. They don’t impact his life. This book is a reminder that most of us tend to ignore the world’s problems until they show up on our doorstep. We don’t truly care about something until it impacts us. But, by the time we start paying attention to problems, it may be too late to solve them.
This book helps the reader see the scale of the refugee crisis. “Crisis” is not an overstatement. There were 500 refugees on the boat that sank. The Coast Guard and private citizens did whatever they could to rescue the refugees, but more than 360 of them drowned. That was just one boat. Boats full of refugees go past Lampedusa every day on their way to Europe.
I feel bad for criticizing anything about this book, but I wasn’t a fan of the writing. At first, I wondered if it was a translation (it isn’t) because the writing is stilted. There are also a few awkward scene transitions. It felt like it took me a few seconds too long to figure out where the characters are and who is in the scene.
If you’re interested in the world’s refugee problem, then this book is a must-read. It won’t take you very long to get through, and it’ll give you a lot to think about.
The Optician of Lampedusa is written by BBC reporter Emma Jane Kirby. She tells the true story of Lampedusa’s only optician and the day that changed his life forever. In October of 2013, the optician and seven of his friends were on a boating trip in the Mediterranean when they heard a strange noise. They steered their boat toward the noise and discovered hundreds of people drowning in the waves.
“I thought I'd heard seagulls screeching. Seagulls fighting over a lucky catch. Birds. Just birds.” - The Optician of Lampedusa
The strange noise was people screaming. A boat full of refugees had sunk. The optician and his friends managed to pull 47 people out of the ocean. Before this event, the optician had never given much thought to the refugee crisis, but after he pulled the people from the water, he became desperate to know what happens to the refugees after they leave Lampedusa.
This tiny book (fewer than 200 pages) is an important read, but it’s not an easy one. Aside from the graphic scenes of drowning, it’s difficult to read because the optician is so relatable. He sees refugees every day, but he doesn’t know much about them. They don’t impact his life. This book is a reminder that most of us tend to ignore the world’s problems until they show up on our doorstep. We don’t truly care about something until it impacts us. But, by the time we start paying attention to problems, it may be too late to solve them.
This book helps the reader see the scale of the refugee crisis. “Crisis” is not an overstatement. There were 500 refugees on the boat that sank. The Coast Guard and private citizens did whatever they could to rescue the refugees, but more than 360 of them drowned. That was just one boat. Boats full of refugees go past Lampedusa every day on their way to Europe.
“Thirteen thousand asylum-seekers had arrived in Italy so far this year—Gabriele had told them that when he'd come to fetch them in the car to take them to the aircraft hangar. Until now it had just been a random, meaningless figure, an empty statistic. Yet here they were before them, flesh and blood, bone and gristle, with the salt of their tears mingling with their own.” - The Optician of Lampedusa
I feel bad for criticizing anything about this book, but I wasn’t a fan of the writing. At first, I wondered if it was a translation (it isn’t) because the writing is stilted. There are also a few awkward scene transitions. It felt like it took me a few seconds too long to figure out where the characters are and who is in the scene.
If you’re interested in the world’s refugee problem, then this book is a must-read. It won’t take you very long to get through, and it’ll give you a lot to think about.
“He could not ignore the fact that the waving hands had always been visible to him. They had waved in the water, yes, but they had also waved from the reception centre, from the church steps and from the roadside where he had jogged past them, blindly. They had waved from the newspaper columns and from the television screens where he had filtered them out and switched them off. They had always been in his line of vision and he had chosen not to see them.” - The Optician of Lampedusa
October 8, 2018
"Lui qui a toujours vénéré la mer, il surveille l'onde scintillante avec méfiance. Il connait son étendue et sa puissance vertigineuses. Dès qu'il est en sa présence, l'opticien se sent relié à elle par des liens invisibles. Aujourd'hui pourtant, il perçoit son hostilité - ou du moins sa nature équivoque. Il sait avec quelle perfidie elle a piégé ces centaines de vies. Combien d'autres épaves sommeillent dans ses abîmes ? Combien de naufragés sans espoir ont rendu leur dernier souffle dans ses entrailles ?"
"Quel naïf je fais ! rumine l'opticien. Quel naïf ! Il y aura toujours une tristesse plus profonde, plus absolue, insondable, indicible."
"Je les voyais tous les jours. A la télévision, en photo dans les journaux, j'entendais leurs voix à la radio. Pourtant, je n'ai jamais fait attention. Je n'ai pas tendu la main. Pas avant ce jour en mer.
Quarante-sept. Nous en avons sauvé quarante-sept. Nos n'avons pas pu les saver tous.
Je n'ai pas voulu jouer au héros. Quand je repense à cette journée, je me sens minuscule. Insignifiant. Je me souviens seulement des mains agrippées aux miennes, des doigts soudés. Je me souviens aussi des mains qui ont glissé, disparues à jamais."
"J'étais en mer ce jour-là. Demain je serai en mer de nouveau. Cela arrivera encore, un autre jour, un autre bateau. Il y aura davantage de mains, de corps battant l'eau, de voix suppliantes."
"Quel naïf je fais ! rumine l'opticien. Quel naïf ! Il y aura toujours une tristesse plus profonde, plus absolue, insondable, indicible."
"Je les voyais tous les jours. A la télévision, en photo dans les journaux, j'entendais leurs voix à la radio. Pourtant, je n'ai jamais fait attention. Je n'ai pas tendu la main. Pas avant ce jour en mer.
Quarante-sept. Nous en avons sauvé quarante-sept. Nos n'avons pas pu les saver tous.
Je n'ai pas voulu jouer au héros. Quand je repense à cette journée, je me sens minuscule. Insignifiant. Je me souviens seulement des mains agrippées aux miennes, des doigts soudés. Je me souviens aussi des mains qui ont glissé, disparues à jamais."
"J'étais en mer ce jour-là. Demain je serai en mer de nouveau. Cela arrivera encore, un autre jour, un autre bateau. Il y aura davantage de mains, de corps battant l'eau, de voix suppliantes."
August 17, 2021
This book is about an optician on the island of Lampedusa who goes on a boat trip with some friends. In the morning, while at sea, they come across a sunken ship carrying over 300 migrants. The optician and his friend rescue as many as they can, and the rest of the book is about his feelings and experiences over the next year.
2 stars because the subject matter is so important and I did finish it. It's another white saviour narrative (not a very good one) and sadly it often others the refugees. Left me with too many questions about why this book was even written, instead of being impassioned to find out more about the refugee crisis.
I am in awe at what the optician and his friends did that day, but I don't think theirs is the story that needed to be told. Why didn't Kirby work with one of the refugees themselves, it would have been so much more powerful and interesting? The optician says he didn't want to be a hero, so why agree to have a whole book written about him and his life and his experience?
On too many occasions reading this, I had to pause to internally sigh about having to hear more about the opticians privileged life, when I could have been finding out about the refugees experiences.
2 stars because the subject matter is so important and I did finish it. It's another white saviour narrative (not a very good one) and sadly it often others the refugees. Left me with too many questions about why this book was even written, instead of being impassioned to find out more about the refugee crisis.
I am in awe at what the optician and his friends did that day, but I don't think theirs is the story that needed to be told. Why didn't Kirby work with one of the refugees themselves, it would have been so much more powerful and interesting? The optician says he didn't want to be a hero, so why agree to have a whole book written about him and his life and his experience?
On too many occasions reading this, I had to pause to internally sigh about having to hear more about the opticians privileged life, when I could have been finding out about the refugees experiences.
July 8, 2024
Premier roman terminé de l'année, et première claque.
Emma-Jane Kirby est journaliste et reporter, elle a écrit ce témoignage après s'être entretenue avec l'opticien de Lampedusa, un homme ordinaire qui a vécu une tragédie.
Le récit se situe en octobre 2013 au moment du terrible naufrage d'une embarcation transportant environ 500 migrants clandestins, la plupart venant d'Erythrée et de Somalie. Carmine Menna part avec sa femme et quelques amis pour une promenade en voilier. Ils vont se retrouver littéralement au milieu d'une marée humaine, des centaines d'hommes, de femmes et d'enfants, certains déjà morts, d'autres encore en vie. Ils vont tenter de sauver un maximum de naufragés et remonteront en tout 47 personnes à bord de leur bateau.
Ce livre est le récit du sauvetage mais aussi et surtout de l'après.
Evidemment c'est un texte bouleversant, qui éveille la conscience et soulève des questions.
Une lecture nécessaire s'il en est.
Emma-Jane Kirby est journaliste et reporter, elle a écrit ce témoignage après s'être entretenue avec l'opticien de Lampedusa, un homme ordinaire qui a vécu une tragédie.
Le récit se situe en octobre 2013 au moment du terrible naufrage d'une embarcation transportant environ 500 migrants clandestins, la plupart venant d'Erythrée et de Somalie. Carmine Menna part avec sa femme et quelques amis pour une promenade en voilier. Ils vont se retrouver littéralement au milieu d'une marée humaine, des centaines d'hommes, de femmes et d'enfants, certains déjà morts, d'autres encore en vie. Ils vont tenter de sauver un maximum de naufragés et remonteront en tout 47 personnes à bord de leur bateau.
Ce livre est le récit du sauvetage mais aussi et surtout de l'après.
Evidemment c'est un texte bouleversant, qui éveille la conscience et soulève des questions.
Une lecture nécessaire s'il en est.
December 10, 2016
I feel a little bit bad for giving this book such a low rating. It is undoubtedly a very worthy story richly deserving of telling, yet for such a short book I often found myself slogging through it simply to get to the end. For me, a good short book can be read in 2-3 sittings (or fewer), yet this took me about a dozen. Despite the merits of the story, I found the prose rather turgid and stilted; the characters loosely drawn rather than fully fleshed out; and often, for a story that is fundamentally one of human emotions, an emotional chasm between the reader and the events and experiences being described.
October 8, 2021
Partendo dal presupposto che ciò che è accaduto, e continua ad accadere, non fa assolutamente parte del mio giudizio, ho trovato questo libro poco coinvolgente. La prosa era piatta, manca di spessore e non c’è caratterizzazione.
Quasi fin dall’inizio mi sono ritrovata ad andare avanti nella lettura solo per finirlo, il che è un vero peccato: una storia così tragica meritava qualcosa in più a livello stilistico.
Quasi fin dall’inizio mi sono ritrovata ad andare avanti nella lettura solo per finirlo, il che è un vero peccato: una storia così tragica meritava qualcosa in più a livello stilistico.
December 11, 2016
Prepare to be profoundly moved and to see the refugee crisis through a different lens. There is so much humanity in this book. I will never forget it.
February 6, 2017
Read as part of the read harder challenge- read a travel memoir.
October 2, 2018
A timely and relevant book, based on a true story, about an Italian optician who encounters a shipwreck of migrants on a sailing trip, his efforts to rescue them, and the aftermath. Kirby’s style is straightforward and journalistic which generally works well given the subject matter and keeps the narrative pacey. However, it also means that the story lacks finesse; the dialogue is often clumsy, occasionally slipping into jarring polemic, and the characters are not fully developed, their actions obviously plot devices to allow Kirby to weave in factual context. Overall though, a thought-provoking, well-researched book that tells an important story, packs a powerful emotional punch, and doesn't shy away from the horrifying impact on both the migrants and the rescuers.
February 15, 2023
The 5 stars are not for style or enjoyment, but for the importance of the subject t matter. It's a difficult read in the sense that it is a visceral description of refugees drowning or, if they are lucky, being rescued by some ordinary people having a relaxing weekend in their boat. These people were never the same again. I thought I understood the refugee situation but I didn't. The horror is hard to bear, and it sheds light on the cruelty and lack of compassion that we in Europe and Britain have towards desperate people looking for safety or asylum. It is a true story, and, for me, it is an important book for all caring people to read.
November 27, 2023
This is a visceral telling of the people and their traffickers that are the reality of the current "Stop the Boats" mantra. It is not about migrants, it is about humanity. An episode which echoes with "there but for the grace of God, go I"
Based on her reporting Kirby details the day friends went out for an end of summer sail and came upon a vista of (approx 500) people drowning, covered in oil and petrol. The small boat they crewed had limited capacity and whilst they saved lives, many more were lost.
This novella gives faces to an issue of our times. The survivors and what they face, the dead, the money makers and the traumatic effect on the lives of the rescuers.
I found that a deeper chord could have been struck in the narrative if the optician's name had been used, rather than "the optician". Everybody else was named except him and his narration. For me, this gave a level of remove from this tragedy which I thought spoiled rather than enhanced. I would have like to have heard the reverse of well-heeled Italian trauma and more from the "victims"
Based on her reporting Kirby details the day friends went out for an end of summer sail and came upon a vista of (approx 500) people drowning, covered in oil and petrol. The small boat they crewed had limited capacity and whilst they saved lives, many more were lost.
This novella gives faces to an issue of our times. The survivors and what they face, the dead, the money makers and the traumatic effect on the lives of the rescuers.
I found that a deeper chord could have been struck in the narrative if the optician's name had been used, rather than "the optician". Everybody else was named except him and his narration. For me, this gave a level of remove from this tragedy which I thought spoiled rather than enhanced. I would have like to have heard the reverse of well-heeled Italian trauma and more from the "victims"
September 29, 2024
Sono costretta a mettere 2 stelle a un libro che, per il tema e il contenuto, ne avrebbe meritate 5 (anche perché la storia raccontata è vera).
Ma è un libro scritto così male da far venire il nervoso a chi legge:
-- il primo capitolo e l'ultimo capitolo sono scritti in prima persona, il secondo in terza persona al presente, mentre tutto il resto è scritto in terza persona ma al passato.
Non ho assolutamente capito il motivo di queste scelte.
-- tutti i personaggi hanno un nome, tranne l'ottico di Lampedusa. Il perché non si capisce. Alla fine, nei ringraziamenti, si cita il nome dell'ottico. Perché allora non inserirlo sempre anche nella storia?
Invece le frasi del libro erano circa così: "l'ottico di Lampedusa, Teresa, Maria e Francesco andarono..."
A me frasi del genere facevano venire male agli occhi.
Poi, per non chiamarlo sempre "l'ottico ", veniva nominato con un semplice "lui". Solo che, se nel paragrafo precedente c'era un certo Matteo, e poi subito dopo mi trovavo un "lui", ovviamente io lo riferivo per prima cosa a Matteo: e invece no, andando avanti, si capiva che quel "lui" era l'ottico...!
Per me, una cosa del genere è illeggibile.
-- l'ottico viene un po' rappresentato come un personaggio da romanzo, perciò ti viene mostrata la sua vita, le cose in cui crede, come cambia... Solo che l'impressione è di un "raccontino", in cui tutto viene riassunto velocemente (il libro infatti è molto breve).
Concludendo: sembra un testo raffazzonato all'ultimo secondo, senza un minimo di grammatica, scritto con i piedi (se posso dire).
E personalmente mi dispiace.
Il tema è molto importante, la storia è vera, e proprio per questo, non si può scrivere così.
Ma è un libro scritto così male da far venire il nervoso a chi legge:
-- il primo capitolo e l'ultimo capitolo sono scritti in prima persona, il secondo in terza persona al presente, mentre tutto il resto è scritto in terza persona ma al passato.
Non ho assolutamente capito il motivo di queste scelte.
-- tutti i personaggi hanno un nome, tranne l'ottico di Lampedusa. Il perché non si capisce. Alla fine, nei ringraziamenti, si cita il nome dell'ottico. Perché allora non inserirlo sempre anche nella storia?
Invece le frasi del libro erano circa così: "l'ottico di Lampedusa, Teresa, Maria e Francesco andarono..."
A me frasi del genere facevano venire male agli occhi.
Poi, per non chiamarlo sempre "l'ottico ", veniva nominato con un semplice "lui". Solo che, se nel paragrafo precedente c'era un certo Matteo, e poi subito dopo mi trovavo un "lui", ovviamente io lo riferivo per prima cosa a Matteo: e invece no, andando avanti, si capiva che quel "lui" era l'ottico...!
Per me, una cosa del genere è illeggibile.
-- l'ottico viene un po' rappresentato come un personaggio da romanzo, perciò ti viene mostrata la sua vita, le cose in cui crede, come cambia... Solo che l'impressione è di un "raccontino", in cui tutto viene riassunto velocemente (il libro infatti è molto breve).
Concludendo: sembra un testo raffazzonato all'ultimo secondo, senza un minimo di grammatica, scritto con i piedi (se posso dire).
E personalmente mi dispiace.
Il tema è molto importante, la storia è vera, e proprio per questo, non si può scrivere così.
May 6, 2024
I enjoyed this, but it sometimes felt too over-explained. I felt like the author was explicitly telling the reader how the characters feel and it was too obvious. I understand that the characters were feeling exactly how I probably would (and honestly sometimes exactly how I have felt) but also that it focused completely on the trauma of the privileged Italians and not the migrants? But that might be the point? Not totally sure how I feel. Very sad.
September 26, 2023
"I am humbled. Whenever I have a tough period now in my life, I always go back to that scene on the sea. In my hands I feel again the grip of those naked, desperate people who were so close to the end. And I say to myself: you have a little house, you have your little business, you have a little family. You are not in the water."
10/10
10/10
Displaying 1 - 30 of 215 reviews