Smaller, less encyclopaedic than his masterwork Danube, Claudio Magris adopts in this book an equally learned but far more personal, more random and perhaps even more reflective tone. The prose is as beautiful, possessing his characteristic conversational ease. Whereas Danube is an odyssey inspired by the complex history and cultures of the countries through which the great river of Mitteleuropa flows on its way to the Black Sea, Microcosms explores the elusive and allusive borderlands of Istria and Italy. It is not a linear narrative. It lacks the structure which the physical presence of the river provided for the earlier book. Instead it is more about states of mind and individual experience. Above all it is the world of Magris himself, an Italian rooted in the most philosophical of European cultures, Germany's. Trieste is the heart of the book; it is also his native city, and more than anything this narrative is about being suspended between northernand southern cultures. , but it is also that of a public park and even a church. Observations, stories and lives lived, it proves a rich, graceful and melancholic journey.
