Running with Pirates is an elegantly crafted and finely detailed memoir in which Gíslason recounts his trips to Corfu as a vulnerable teen and, decades later, as a father. The book is carefully structured via parallel narratives that express and exploit memoir’s inherent interest in the tension between the storied past and the remembering present.

Readers are primarily hooked into the story by their concern for the young Gíslason who turns up to Corfu as a penniless, naive, fatherless ‘stray’. He is quickly taken under the wing of an eccentric and potentially dangerous local called Pirate. The reader is drawn further into the memoir by their sympathy for the present-day writer-father who anxiously grapples with letting his teen sons make their own way in the world.

When Gíslason first saw Corfu it struck him ‘a place of return’, a place with ‘its own timeframe’, and a place where hospitality ‘was a form of love for the world and for strangers’. His book paints a tender portrait of this lost era and truly evokes how its slower, quieter and less ‘connected’ nature allowed people to escape their lives and take real risks in their search for other selves.

Though Gíslason and Corfu have changed when he returns as an adult, the island still helps him enact the ‘sharing and letting’ that is integral to being a parent: Gíslason shows how memories, as stories, are fundamental to our relationship with both ourselves and others.

Running with Pirates is a touching memoir that sees Gíslason confront important life lessons, including those that the Corfoits taught his younger self: be wary of how the past and the present re/write each other; accept that safety and risk must coexist; know that all change entails loss.

Reviewed by Helen Gildfind

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kári Gíslason is a writer and academic who teaches creative writing and literary studies at QUT. He is the author of The Promise of Iceland (UQP, 2011), which told the story of return journeys he’s made to his birthplace, and the novels The Ash Burner (UQP, 2015) and The Sorrow Stone (UQP, 2022).

He is also the co-author, with Richard Fidler, of Saga Land, and has written works of travel journalism, essays, reviews and radio scripts.