Microcosms (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Magris, Claudio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784871303 ISBN 13: 9781784871307

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2016

Synopsis

In the tiny borderlands of Istria and Italy, from the forests of Monte Nevoso, to the hidden valleys of the Tyrol, to a Trieste café, Microcosms 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.

About this title

Review

"A haunting amalgam of travelogue, autobiography and impressionist sketch book" (Jonathan Keates Literary Review)

"Claudio Magris is engaged on a seductively exciting journey of the imagination, which enriches and enthrals" (Eileen Battersby Irish Times)

"Microcosms, in its subtly magical blend of the public and the personal, of the inner voice and the voices without, of the café and of the study, of the hearth and of the world, is a unique and wonderful achievement" (John Banville New York Review of Books)

"A haunting series of evocations and recollections... the very antithesis of your run-of-the-mill travel book" (Jan Morris Observer)

From the Publisher

The new masterpiece by the author of DANUBE
Claudio Magris, the author of the classic history and travel book, Danube, has written a new classic of cultural criticism and social history. This is what the critics say:

"This is a smaller book than Danube, less encyclopedic; it is equally learned, equally humane, more personal, more random, even more reflective. Magris is a European schooled in that most philosophical of European cultures, Germany’s. The beauty of the everyday observations contained in this new book compete with the profundity of historical insight. In common with his fellow intellectual visionary, W.G. Sebald, author of the Rings of Saturn, Claudio Magris is engaged in a seductively exciting journey of the imagination which enriches and enthralls" Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

"Magris’s writing has never been more intimate than in the beautiful last chapter" Mark Thompson, Independent

"Microcosms still has flashes of the old Magris brilliance" Ian Thomson, Observer

"Parts of this audacious, complex and stimulating book read like fiction, as Magris develops quirky characterisations; others are brilliantly philosophical, as when he describes the sense of time’s dilation in a lagoon" Baret Magarian, Daily Telegraph

" . . . Microcosms is a haunting amalgam of travelogue, autobiography and impressionist sketchbook. Eurosceptics might learn something from a work which at once celebrates the blurring and confusion of peoples, languages and national boundaries, and shows how tradition and individuality survive in spite of, or because of, the muddle" Jonathan Keates, Literary Review

"A keen historical understanding is matched with a novelist’s attention to atmospheric detail – Magris charts the solitary human trajectory and dignifies it. He is a writer who knows that objectivity is a delusional vanity, yet he never becomes solipsistic; Magris’s catalogue of writers and their visions, of little-known poets I shall probably never hear of again, becomes itself a prose poem of reverberating beauty" Marcella Evaristi, Herald

"In Microcosms, Magris shows himself to be a European essayist of the highest calibre" Stuart Hood, Sunday Herald

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1784871303
• ISBN 13: 9781784871307
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288