Magris, a guide of enormous modesty, has not only read everything: he has been everywhere, met everybody – from the sniper employed to shoot rabbits in a Viennese cemetery, to the prostitute who comes each year to sit in the Cemetery of the Nameless and mourn her still-born child.

Translated from Italian by Patrick Creagh (Paperback edition). His impeccable narrative, which took more than 20 years to write, mingles travel, history, anecdote and literature, and in the end, for me, steals the laurel from three other candidates whose influence it shows: Fernando Pessoa ('The Book of Disquietude'), Jorge Luis Borges ('Labyrinths') and Gabriel García Márquez ('Love in the Time of Cholera'). Return to Article Details Claudio Magris: Danube.

In 'Danube', the Trieste writer Claudio Magris steers us through the region created and enclosed by the river and known as Mitteleuropa. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD FLANAGAN In this fascinating journey Claudio Magris, whose knowledge is encyclopaedic and whose curiosity limitless, guides his reader from the source of the Danube in the Bavarian hills through Austro-Hungary and the Balkans to the Black Sea. 'Who ever saw a green horse or an intelligent Serb?' is a Romanian proverb of lengthy stock. Asked in 1921 to consider an invitation to become king of Albania, Lord Inchape is supposed to have stared at the motorcyclist who brought him the urgent message, and replied: 'Where is it?' (He declined on the grounds 'It's not in my line.'). It consists of a series of stories about memorable and well-defined characters, one of which was read by a professional actress, Melissa OConnor, in English. The Balkans shaped the opening and close of our last century, but for poorly prepared Westerners they remain, even now, a distant cauldron into which we like to toss our prejudices, ignorance and jokes an indeterminate, Ruritanian region, full of people with names like Zog and nowhere better evoked than in the novels of John Buchan and Dornford Yates. Danube follows the course of the Danube River from its origins to the Black Sea Microcosms begins and ends in Trieste, with excursions to other areas of Italy, such as Turin.

Danube magris