CLAUDIO MAGRIS (b. 1939) is an Italian writer and scholar. He is the author of works of literary criticism and plays and has translated works by Ibsen, Kleist, and Schnitzler. His numerous studies have helped to promote an awareness in Italy of Central European culture and of the literature of the Habsburg myth. He won the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters in 2004 and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2016.
In his most famous work, DANUBE (1986), Magris guides his reader from the source of the Danube in the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to the Black Sea. Along the way he raises the ghosts that inhabit the houses and monuments -- from Ovid to Kafka and Canetti -- and in so doing sets his finger on the pulse of Central Europe, the vital crucible of a culture that draws on influences of East and West, of Christendom and Islam.
In A DIFFERENT SEA (1991), Enrico, a young intellectual, has been taught by his closest friend, a philosopher/poet who commits suicide in his early twenties, to search for an authentic life, free of social falsehoods. But in his search for this unattainable goal, Enrico destroys every chance he has of a normal existence. This is portrait of a world in ferment, a decaying empire shaken by war and revolution, and a life-long search for meaning.
MICROCOSMS (1997) pieces together a mosaic of stories -- comic, tragic, picaresque, nostalgic -- from life's minor characters. Their worlds might be small, but they are far from minimalist: in them flashes the great, the meaningful, the unrepeatable significance of every existence.
JOURNEYING (2005) is a collection of writings penned during trips and wanderings over the span of several decades. 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.
Hailed as a masterpiece upon its initial publication, BLINDLY (2006) is a novel of original, poetic intensity. Its reclusive and fugitive narrator is 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.
BLAMELESS (2015) is a tale of one man’s obsessive project to collect the instruments of death, evil, and humanity’s darkest atrocities in order to oppose them. 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 following books are in ePUB format:
* Blameless (Yale UP, 2017). Translated by Anne Milano Appel.
* Blindly (Yale UP, 2012). Translated by Anne Milano Appel.
* Danube (Harvill, 2008). Translated by Patrick Creagh.
* Different Sea, A (Harvill, 1995). Translated by M. S. Spurr.
* Journeying (Yale UP, 2018). Translated by Anne Milano Appel.
* Microcosms (Harvill, 2000). Translated by Iain Halliday.
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