Customer Reviews

Danube (FSG Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Magris's account of the journey, from its obscure and contested origins in Germany (Donaueschingen? Brigach? Furtwangen?), to the Black Sea is alternatingly scintillating and impenetrably dense. It is fully possible that many of the stylistic difficulties that occur hear arise out of the translation process.

Despite the occasional obfuscation, this is a deeply intriguing book. I picked it up, thinking that it may perhaps successfully do for the Donau (Danube) what Rebecca West's monumental "Black lamb and Grey Falcon" did for Yugoslavia, namely to serve as a marvelous compilation of historical narratives and anecdotes, sort of a "reference point for the ages". In this, "Danube" does not disappoint. There may be thousands of more readable books, but this one is rare, in that it blends so wonderfully narrative, history, and anecdote. Ultimately even the denseness of the prose may be a virtue...it reduces the reader's speed, allowing us to better digest and reflect upon its contents. I recommend it.

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.

Danube
Claudio Magris
2001
ISBN 1-86046-823-3

I have seen the Danube at Donauwoerth in Germany and Linz and Melk in Austria. When I came across Claudio Magris' book, I was interested enough to buy it. Magris' book about the Danube is an unusual one. It is not a travel book, but more the historical reflections of a man visiting centuries-old towns along the river from where it originates in Germany to where it ends in the Black Sea in Rumania.

Since I have visited or read about some of the towns along the Danube in the German-speaking world, I found that part of the book more interesting. I knew less about the other countries -- Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Rumania, and I did not relate as well to that part of the book.

On the whole, there are some obstacles to overcome in reading this book. The writer's style is rather wordy and rambling. In one sentence, for example, I counted seventy-five words. There are endless literary and historical references, many of which are somewhat obscure. For me, eventually they grew tiresome. The book, in English, is a translated work. At points, one wonders if the rendering of sentences such as, "That life which the photograph fixed in one of its instants is vanished forever", could not have been translated in plainer English.

Still, some of this book is good reading. Magris' story about the director of the river works at Linz who spent a lifetime marking out the confines of the upper Danube and wrote a three volume work of 2,164 pages about all the aspects of the river from the different types of rafts and barges to the poems, songs, plays, and novels that related to the river is amusing. At the other extreme, Magris' description of visiting the terrible stone quarry at Mauthausen concentration camp that the Nazis set up on the Danube, where 110,000 people died, is disturbing.

On the whole, I would say this book is interesting reading in places. Elsewhere, it drags a bit. For example, consider a sentence such as, "Are the Istrians therefore Thracians, as Apollodorus thought, or Colchians, according to the view of Pliny and Strabo, or are they Gepids? "

Perhaps, the main problem with "Danube" is that the scope and coverage of the book are simply too great. The countries through which the lower reaches of the Danube flow do not have so much in common with those of the German-speaking part of the Danube. Like the Nile, it is a very long river, and, similarly it comes into contact with a number of lands with differing cultural traditions and histories. The Danube as an organizational theme for Magris' reflections about history and literature falters in the face of the great diversity of the material. Also, there is the question of if this book is really about the Danube or more a vehicle for Magris' wide-ranging interests.

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.

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!

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.

This is an excellent book, far from conventional travel writing, a combination of travelogue and philosophical essay, a personal appreciation of the cultural and literary landscape of the Danube. Written with a slightly melancholy tone and extensive knowledge and sensitivity, it is erudite and learned but not academic. With short chapters a few pages long (some are only a paragraph or two), the book is more like a series of thoughts or tableaux than a single essay. This format might reflect how we acquire cultural knowledge in bits and pieces and is well suited to conveying a subject so nuanced and many-layered. Places along the Danube inspire reflections on history, identity, nationalism, fascism, the confrontation between the West and Islam, the abuse of power, ethnic and racial prejudice and hatred, artistic creativity, the nature of time, and our human condition and mortality. Along the way we encounter Goethe, Grillparzer, Napoleon, Kepler, Kafka, Heidegger, Celan, Marcus Aurelius, Ovid, Eliade and other luminaries, as well as a Serbian grandmother and Trieste resident who revisits her home in the Banat and provides insights on the relationships among the many nationalities there. As a professor of German literature, Claudio Magris is especially attentive to the vanished or vanishing German communities of southeastern Europe.

Any journey along the Danube inevitably raises unanswerable questions: What is Europe? Where does it begin and end? While Magris might not answer these, he looks beneath shifting borders and changing regimes; since the book was written, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union have been replaced by other political entities. He is able to find beauty (or at least food for thought) in unlikely places and lends credibility to the idea of a shared Danubian culture or civilization. Several place-names are misspelled, no doubt the fault of the editor/publisher, not the author; observations on life under communism are now happily out of date. Many of the intellectual and literary figures Magris discusses may be obscure, but if you have spent time in this part of the world you will find his book meaningful. Anyone seriously interested in the Habsburg Empire or Austria-Hungary should read it. One wants to say thank you to Professor Magris for taking us along.

The book is a dense collection of thoughts, experiences, reflections and recollections, which begin at the source of the Danube and end at the terminus with the Black Sea. I picked up this book for a trip in the eastern European region, with many stops along the Danube. While the book is packed with a wide array of historical, literary and artistic references, I found the exposure to new ideas refreshing, even if they disrupt the flow of the book at times. The translation from the artistic Italian prose to English seems to create unnecessarily dense wording at times, but the comprehensive collage of imagery made the book worthwhile in the end. To me, I found the style of writing like the flow of the massive Danube: sometimes it slowly swirls reflectively, but it constantly moves onwards...

You really have to be in the right mood to read this. In an odd way, the writing is at the same time dense and spacy. A bit of diarrhea of the thoughts. The description on the back cover refers to Magris' vast knowledge. This may be, but that's no excuse for what might to some seem like an inability to stay on any kind of track. One image leads to ponderings, which leads to more ponderings and it isn't always easy to remember what caused the mild wandering in the first place. That having been said, there really are times when this is precisely what one wants to read. A long afternoon, some tea, time to ponder, this is when this book can shine. At any case, I wouldn't really describe this as a travelogue, travel guide or even social history. Instead, I would suggest a more rhapsodic, less rigid form or genre definition, though I've no idea what that would be.

This book records one man's journey, but because this man is so many, it's more like the record of a migration.