Microcosms is the ideal title for this beautiful sequence of random observations and stories evoking entire worlds contained in individual experiences. Just over a decade has passed since Magris completed Danube (1986), his masterwork, an equally beautiful and unique personal odyssey inspired by the complex history and cultures of the countries through which the great river of Mitteleuropa passes on its journey to the Black Sea. In that book, Magris allowed the geography of the Danube's course to provide the narrative structure. It is possible to follow the book's progress on a map, and indeed the reader should move between the text and a map.
This new book, exploring the borderlands of Istria and Italy, is both similar and different. There is no index, there is no map. Nor is the narrative linear. States of mind rather than geographical realities dominate. Where Magris was certainly a presence in the earlier book, as one of a band of travellers engaged in a cultural investigation, this time he is central. Trieste is the heart of the book; Magris, a native of that city, understands better than most the sensation of being suspended between cultures.
Microcosms begins and ends in this Adriatic port, where James Joyce lived for a time, a place which in so many ways epitomises the point of contact and tension between southern European and Italian culture, and those of the Germanic and Slav races. Two of the strongest metaphors expressing this mix of cultures is Magris's use of the bustle in a famous cafe in which all dramas are enacted, and later, the universe as defined in a public garden and, finally, a church.
One of the many qualities which set Magris apart as a writer is the ease with which he carries his learning. Nothing is forced; his elegant though conversational prose style is as relaxed and graceful as his material is rich in historical and literary references. While time and place are powerful themes in Danube, this time he concentrates on the individual and the small stories which make up lives and deaths.
General D, a concentration camp survivor who is now suffering from incurable cancer, "has decided to spend the last months of his life preparing the answers to the condolences his wife will receive on his death, condolences from the highest-ranking officers on the general staff. He works as he walks; he thinks of names . . . carefully reconstructs the shared experiences with each of the future sympathizers, to prevent his wife from making any mistakes."
In the same park within which the general prepares his wife's responses to bereaved friends is a bust of the novelist Italo Svevo, another native of Trieste and a friend of James Joyce. There is a simple inscription on its base, "but above the base there is no head, all that is there is the pin which is supposed to support the head, looking like a miniature head". Magris can't help thinking that perhaps this headless state is appropriate; after all, it was Svevo, "a writer who plumbed the depths of ambiguity and emptiness, who grasped the extent to which things are not in order and yet continued to live as if they were", who once remarked "that absence was his destiny".
In Danube, Magris writes of the river that it is "often enveloped in a symbolic anti-German aura. It is the river along which different peoples meet and mingle and crossbreed, rather than being, as the Rhine is, a mythical custodian of the purity of race." While that book charts the essential rejection of the very German culture which so defines the river's route, Microcosms expresses the essence of Germanness which underlines so many aspects of this vibrant, if culturally chaotic, no-man's-land caught between the eastern Alps and the Adriatic. Marin, one of the main characters, personifies this state of being of both and ultimately, perhaps, of neither. As a boy he had acquired the habit of swimming in the Grado lagoon; "that channel was a fatal border," writes Magris, "the front line in a world conflict." Marin, nevertheless, enjoyed swimming it, and continued to do so. "He would cross the channel and come back no longer knowing which was his place, his homeland, which side he was on." A few years later, when studying at Vienna University, he declared "that he was an Italian patriot and meant to go to war against Austria. A few weeks later, however, in Italy, he was protesting to a boorish captain in the Italian Army which he had joined as a volunteer, that he was an Austrian, and accustomed to a more civil style and tone."
Aside from the greater prominence of the individual and also the increased sense of personal memoir and mortality in this book, there is a far greater awareness of the natural world than in Danube. This elusive, multicultural region comes alive through its forests and highlands, its birds, the missing bears tracked by the author and his family, the cat which reigns in the garden. Between the cafe at the beginning and the public park and church at the close, lie valleys, mountains, lagoons, islands and forests - for Magris, "the deep breath of the forest is a lesson in how to feel life as something impartial, indifferent and yet welcoming and inexhaustible".
By way of illustrating the territorial vagaries of history, he notes that "the forest, first Austrian, later Italian, Yugoslav and then Slovene, mocked those changes of names and borders, it belonged to no one; if anything it was the people who belonged to the forest . . ."
Man plays a more passive role in this book; it is as if human life is as subject to nature as the statue of Domenico Rossetti at the main entrance to Trieste's public garden. In grand pose, "wrapped in his cloak, hand on chest", the great man's gravitas is not entirely his. "The marks left by the pigeons have dribbled down his face, leaving him with noble rivulets of tears."
As would be expected of an authority on German literature and culture, Magris never loses sight of its relevance to the world he explores and explains. "German literature, with its symbiosis of poetry and philosophy, has set itself the most radical questions regarding the individual in modern society . . ." 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 is an Irish Times journalist
