World Republic of Letters (Yale)
4 total works
A writer of enormous erudition and wide-ranging travels, Claudio Magris selects for this volume writings penned during trips and wanderings over the span of several decades. He has traveled through these years with many beloved companions, to whom he dedicates the book, and sought the kind of journey "that occurs when you abandon yourself to [the gentle current of time] and to whatever life brings."
Taken together Magris's essays share a clearly identified theme. They represent the motif of the journey in all its aspects-literary, metaphysical, spiritual, mythical, philosophical, historical-as well as the author's comprehensive understanding of the subject or, one might say, of his own way of being in the world. Traveling from Spain to Germany to Poland, Norway, Vietnam, Iran, and Australia, he records particular moments and places through a highly personal lens. A writer's writer and a reader's traveler, Magris proves that wandering is equal part wondering.
Hailed as a masterpiece when first published in Italy, Magris's innovative novel is now available to English-language readers
Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly? Clearly a recluse and a fugitive, but what more of him can we discern? Baffled by the events of his own life, he muses, "When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread."
Claudio Magris, one of Europe's leading authors and cultural philosophers, offers as narrator of Blindly a madman. Yes, but a pazzo lucido, a lucid madman, a single narrative voice populated by various characters. He is Jorgen Jorgenson, the nineteenth-century adventurer who became king of Iceland but was condemned to forced labor in the Antipodes. He is also Comrade Cippico, a communist militant, imprisoned for years in Tito's gulag on the island Goli Otok. And he is the many partisans, prisoners, sailors, and stowaways who have encountered the perils of travel, war, and adventure. In a shifting choral monologue-part confession, part psychiatric session-a man remembers (invents, falsifies, hides, screams out) his life, a voyage into the nether regions of history, and in particular the twentieth century.
Claudio Magris's searing new novel ruthlessly confronts the human obsession with war and its savagery in every age and every country. His tale centers on a man whose maniacal devotion to the creation of a Museum of War involves both a horrible secret and the hope of redemption. Luisa Brooks, his museum's curator, a descendant of victims of Jewish exile and of black slavery, has a complex dilemma: will the collections she exhibits save humanity from repeating its tragic and violent past? Or might the display of articles of war actually valorize and memorialize evil atrocities?
In Blameless Magris affirms his mastery of the novel form, interweaving multiple themes and traveling deftly through history. With a multitude of stories, the author investigates individual sorrow, the societal burden of justice aborted, and the ways in which memory and historical evidence are sabotaged or sometimes salvaged.
The internationally acclaimed author Claudio Magris offers a collection of brief “snapshots” reflecting on life and culture from 1999 to 2013 through his very personal lens. Some pieces portray private, intimate moments, while others offer views on public, sometimes controversial matters; the tone is sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, sometimes ironic, but always engaging. The panoramic nature of the vignettes is broad in scope, encompassing a variety of subjects rendered in quick, decisive brushstrokes. It is a little like leafing through a photo album of our times and our society while a learned companion seated beside us offers a perceptive running commentary. Magris’s wit—at times pungent, at times self‑deprecating, always keen—is refreshingly affable. A continuing adventure by the author who has reinvented “travel literature.”