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 OMEGA OF SOLACE May 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The best book of an age is a brave new form of imagination and wisdom. "Danube" is a post-generic transcendence of art and vision to an unknown zodiac of meaning. When a book is a leap of creativity, it is an honor to be a reader.
A majestic book of 401 pages and 170 chapters, "Danube" follows a mighty river(of 2,888km) from beginning to end as a journey of knowledge--of time, space, history and fate--to find not only where the river ends but also where time, space, history and fate end: in "God's plans." To know anything fully from beginning to end in an absolute feat of knowledge--the way Magris knows the Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea--is to know everything.
At the heart of "Danube" is a visionary outlook on time as a vastness of centuries of meaning that resides like a cosmos in a nutshell in any moment or place of our lives. Every place along the Danube is "a corner in which a vanished enchantment has taken refuge." In a memorable metaphor, Magris sees the countless years of time and history that have "mysteriously disappeared forever" as "fallen leaves" that accumulate like "humus" in the places where we live and in whose unknown depths lie the roots of who we are. For Magris, history settles as geography. With a preternatural vision of "wave after wave" of history--from the dim ancient days of the eighth century B.C. of the Thracians, Cimmerians and Scythians through the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Hapsburgs to the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature to Elias Canetti--"superimposed and deposited one upon another in layer after layer" as "the multiple, composite substratum" of Danubian landscapes and lives, Magris unpacks history out of geography or time out of space. In following a river from place to place across a continent, "Danube" is a mythic descent into buried lives and races, dynasties and empires, ideologies and movements and epochs and civilizations that becomes a miracle of ascent to an ageless meaning untouched by "the incalculable loss of things."
Written out of encyclopedic learning radiant with moral lustre and unrestricted by the contracting conventions of a particular genre, "Danube" is free and "abundant" as a travelogue, a collection of essays, a handbook of biographies, a journal of meditations, a treatise of human geography, a history of "Mitteleuropa," a volume of literary criticism and a book of books all bound with artistic accessories of imagination of the craft of fiction into a post-generic "confederation" of writing and reality.
In "Danube," Magris has re-invented the book as a signifying expression and experience. Magris's book brings to mind the history of the book as a form of expression and a structure of experience and strikes us as beyond comparison with any other book.
An immaculate unity of heart, mind and spirit as a dignity of truth and beauty in words and a profound composition of selfless surrender to "the ultimate and essential things" in which a book becomes a state of being, "Danube" is simply the best book of our time. A soaring act of writing and a sublime structure of wisdom, "Danube" is an omega of solace. With an epic solidarity with everything from beginning to end in a chorus of faculties of awareness of unknown intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and spiritual synthesis, Claudio Magris is writer as hero of wisdom.
Learned, Perceptive, Thoughtful, and Beautifully Translated April 17, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Claudi Magris's work is simply the best travelogue that I have ever read: it is a work of imagination, erudition, and deeply-felt culture, and has been beautifully translated: I have never encountered English prose that better captures the cadence and rhythm of Italian!
A Migration October 10, 2006
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book records one man's journey, but because this man is so many, it's more like the record of a migration.
A magnificent panorama of a very complex history June 15, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Throughout history, the Danube has meant many different things to many different people: a highway, a playground, a barrier against the Turks, a symbol of eternal life or of life's melancholy. Magris structures this book as a travelogue, following the Danube from its source(s) in Germany through its debouchment into the Black Sea in Rumania. But in every place he visits, from a humble bench on the riverbank to the major cities of Vienna and Bucharest, he paints a vivid picture not only of the place itself, but of the people who have shaped its character and history.
I already knew that this region (for which he uses the shorthand term Mitteleuropa) had a complicated history, but I didn't realize how incredibly complicated it was until I read this book. Magris doesn't always untangle the complexities clearly enough for a non-European (and, from living briefly in the region as well as having family roots there, I'm probably better informed than most). On the other hand, his portraits of the people he meets are vivid and memorable -- from the old woman who presides over the 18th-century farmhouse where the Danube (possibly) rises, to the fisher-folk who live at the mouths of the river, to the functionaries and innkeepers who punctuate his journey and the friends who accompany him for parts of it. Writers, living and dead, are evoked as much as politicians and historians; one persistent theme of the book is how literature has reacted to, preserved, and in some instances shaped the history of Mitteleuropa.
All in all, the book is a magnificent achievement and well worth reading, even if some of Magris' observations have been rendered obsolete by the breakup of the Soviet Union. The translation is generally fluid and readable, although one can quibble with it here and there (I found a few minor inaccuracies in the sections that describe places I'm familiar with). And, as for the complaint that the regions traversed by the Danube are "too different" to be treated in one book, that difference *is* part of the story.
A river of memory June 16, 2005
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
In this fascinating journey, Magris takes us from the very -and much disputed- sources of the Danube in the Black Forest, in Southern Germany, to the mouth of the river in the Black Sea, in Romanian territory. Along the way, Magris recreates the legends, stories and historical moments of every village and city he visits. The Danube area is, of course, full of history, since most peoples who ever set foot in Europe seem to have crossed it one way or another. Princes, wars, writers, lovers, many interesting and even fascinating stories illuminate for the reader the waters of the Danube. It really makes you want to make the same trip.
It would be interesting to read an update by Magris, especially about those places who were then under Soviet rule, now that almost 20 years have passed since the publication of the book. Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia all pass before your eyes like a dream.
Every town and story motivates in Magris deep reflections on history, memory, the passage of time, politics, and many other subjects. Magris's prose is dense in the best sense of the term: it is rich and deep, with a poetic quality to it. Very much recommended, it discovers for us many writers from that area who seem worth to read.
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