Microcosms - Softcover

Magris, Claudio

3.75

437 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860466184 ISBN 13: 9781860466182

Publisher: Harvill Press, 1999

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Translated from the Italian, Magis delves into the environment of his Triestine homeland and uncovers the whole of human striving in a microcosm. The city's homes, cafes, markets and railway stations are all forums where humanity descends to transact its business, buy and sell, argue and orate, seek vengeance and do all that defines one as human.

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Review:

"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

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