Danube: A Journey through the Landscape, History and Culture of Central Europe

"This is a strange but wonderful work. It is certainly not a standard history . It is not a travel book . It’s digressive, discursive and elusive. It’s metaphorical. It’s obscure. It’s rambling. But I think it gives a sense of living and experiencing Central Europe. In the course of the book and its meander along the Danube, you go through layers and layers of the past. You go through different landscapes, and you meet different people through time. Magris discusses thinkers, writers and intellectuals. You really get a sense of the richness, diversity and interconnectedness of Central Europe. Magris is a professor of German and a writer of fiction based in Trieste. Trieste is such an interesting place. It was part of the Habsburg Monarchy from the 14th century right up until 1918. There is an Italian-speaking, very powerful majority in the city, but there are also many Slovenians, both in the city and in the surrounding countryside, especially. Magris, who was born and grew up in Trieste, writes in Italian but does not look to Italy—to Rome and Florence, for instance—for his primary cultural inspiration. No, he looks north. He loves German culture. He loves Central Europe and its past. You get that sense from the book. He uses travel on the Danube as a device for digressions and meditations on many different topics. Sometimes the sections seem randomly strung together. There is no real structure. To a large extent, it is a series of disconnected vignettes. But it also somehow functions as a whole. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I suppose the structure is going down the Danube, but he includes many people who had minimal contact with the lands along the Danube. Kafka , Celine and Celan are all discussed, though they only have tangential, fleeting relations to the river. Magris meditates on people, works, episodes, intersections—with a certain nostalgia. In many respects it is clear-eyed as well, especially in relation to the tragedies of war and the Holocaust . You get a sense that the world he is looking for has disappeared. He has regrets about this, similar to those expressed by Zweig in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday. In the 1980s. It sold very well in Europe; I recently read an article where the publishers did not quite know how to market it in the English-speaking world. It is a strange book and very intellectual. Some people may say it is pretentious but it is also extremely beautiful. I think, in the end, it was marketed as a travel book. To some extent it is. The framing of the book is him as a narrator going to a conference in Germany, close to the origin of the Danube, and then it sort of follows the Danube, with many digressions. Ultimately, it really is not a travel book. What sort of book is it? I don’t know, but I do know that I enjoyed it!"