Danube - Softcover

Magris, Claudio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0002720744 ISBN 13: 9780002720748

Publisher: Harvill Press, 1990

Synopsis

This celebrates a river which has been at the centre of the great movements of history, the crucible of a culture that draws on influences of East and West, of Christendom and Islam. The reader accompanies the author along its course, from the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to the Black Sea. In each town he raises the ghosts that inhabit the houses and monuments - Kafka and Freud, Wittgenstein and Marcus Aurelius, Lukacs, Heidegger and Celine, Canetti and Ovid - philosophers, novelists, diplomats and "condottieri", patriots and politicians.

About this title

Review:

"Not simply a masterpiece of travel; it is an odyssey... A splendid book, beautifully translated" (Independent)

"A uniquely stimulating and individual portrait of the heart of Europe" (Colin Thubron Sunday Telegraph)

"This book is full of wonder and delights...Magris writes beautifully; he seems to have read everything. His reading has not made just clever but wise. On almost every page there are passages that make the heart life... Danube is a masterpiece" (John Banville)

"This is the best introduction to the culture of central Europe, its genius and its tragedy...a work of great originality, which builds up to a mosaic of spectacle, incident and reflection from which the personalities of the narrator and the Danubian lands emerge" (Daily Telegraph)

"Erudite and original" (New York Review of Books)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0002720744
• ISBN 13: 9780002720748
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416