What Strange Paradise

Content Warning: This Important Quotes section contains references to distressing scenes, including the death of children.

“A pair of plump orange-necked birds, stragglers from a northbound flock, take rest on the lamppost from which hangs one end of a police cordon. In the breaks between the wailing of the sirens and the murmur of the onlookers, they can be heard singing. The species is not unique to the island nor the island to the species, but the birds, when they stop here, change the pitch of their songs. The call is an octave higher, a sharp, throat-scraping thing.”

The sunhead swifts that visit the island every year mark the change of seasons. Their migration is symbolically linked to both the migrants, such as Amir, and the “natives,” many of whom, like Marianne Hermes and Madame El Ward, are not truly native to the island, their families only having lived there for a few generations.

“Amir read, captivated—not by the plot or the impossible contraptions, but by the way Zaytoon and Zaytoona’s little town always seemed to reset at the beginning of every new story, as though none of the previous ones left a mark. He had never noticed this before, but he noticed it now and, although he couldn’t articulate it, the thing that amazed him was the sheer lightness of such a repairable world. To live so lightly was the real adventure, the biggest adventure.”

Zaytoon and Zaytoona, Amir’s favorite comic book, depicts an idealized world in which any damage is magically repaired by the time of the protagonists’ next adventure. Amir is fascinated with this idea because he exists in a fractured world: His home in Syria has been destroyed by bombs, and because there is no way to fix this, he and his family are now refugees. The comic book thus introduces the theme of The Limits and Possibilities of Escapism.

“She is fifteen and fifteen feels empty, an absence of an age. Some part of her is becoming a stranger to the rest. The first time she sensed it was a year earlier, while wandering among the rocks by the sea at the foot of the sleep-gum forest—the first time she’d seen the severed wings. They sat there in the soil, the bones small and L-shaped at the site of the breaking, dollops of blood like rusted coins on the feathers.”

Vänna’s discovery of the bird wings is symbolically related to her dawning recognition of the unfair situation that the migrants that come to her island are forced into. The bird-eating creature is linked to Colonel Kethros and his soldiers, and it makes an appearance later on in the novel.