Microcosms

Like Claudio Magris' earlier book on the Danube, this is a unique variety of travel writing which joins landscape, cultural history, and philosophical reflection, although more personal and perhaps autobiographical. These sketches or essays begin in Trieste and continue to Friuli, the lagoon landscape between Venice and Trieste, a mountain and forest in Slovenia, the countryside outside Turin, islands in the Gulf of Kvarner/Quarnero, and villages in Alto Adige/Südtirol. A few famous names occur (Pier Paolo Pasolini and James Joyce, for instance) but the author is more interested in the colors of the sea and sky and portraits of relatively unknown or ordinary people: a dialect poet, an eccentric pamphleteer, the regulars who frequent a country inn, or the cats in a public park. While he is a keen observer of the small detail, Magris consistently returns to the perspective of world events and cataclysms. He makes us aware of the complex, many-layered history of these places, the beauty of the landscape as well as the horrors of the past, including the crimes of Italian and German fascism and Yugoslav communism. There are many reflections on nationalism, ethnicity and identity, memory, our mortality, and our ambivalent relationship to nature. These microcosms are small corners of Europe, but they are also borderlands where Italian, Germanic, and Slavic cultures have interacted for centuries and where actual political boundaries have shifted back and forth as empires and republics have come and gone. The encounter of different cultures is one of the threads running through this otherwise not very linear narrative; at one point Magris interprets the legend of Jason and Medea in this light. For Magris, borders are both a necessity and a curse--necessary between ourselves and others to maintain our identity, but the cause of conflict and suffering. All endogamies and exclusive groups are suffocating and a negation of life, which, Magris says, is a sea port. Beginning and ending in the sea port of Trieste, this outstanding book is an invitation to travel, think, and experience.

A companion to "Danube," "Microcosms" extends Claudio Magris's visionary geography in excursions to places around Trieste: the Adriatic lagoons east of Venice, the Nevoso forest in Slovenia between Trieste and Fiume, the Collina countryside near Turin, the Croatian Apsyrtides archipelago in the Gulf of Quarnero south of Istria and the valley of Pusteria of the Tyrol. Magris enunciates his distinctive vision of geography in a memorable metaphor: "Place are bobbins where time is wound up upon itself. To write is to unravel these bobbins, to undo, like Penelope, the fabric of history. So it is perhaps not a complete waste of time to try to write something down." For Magris, a place is a complex foundation of existence that is an intricate genealogy of nature, time, history and fate. Each of the places of "Microcosms" has a striking meaning. For example, the Apsyrtides signify immortality or "the pure present moment that is enough in itself and does not tire itself out in the rush towards goals to be reached" or "happiness with no object" from which in "exile" in time "the individual who has lost the absolute seeks to replace it with remedies dreamed out of his own private squalor."The Nevoso embodies a remote mystery--of aeons of time and evanescence--from which we humans are inseparable and it leaves us in harmony with "the primordial inchoate, that pulls back into its womb all things and forms." One morning when the clearing of Pomocnjaki in the Nevoso is a "perfect cathedral of light," a roe suddenly appears and then disappears--"entering and fading in the impenetrable clarity"--magically freeing Magris from fear of death. Places in "Microcosms" are "wound" with feats of mind and spirit of wonderful lives finding meaning beyond fate. Magris extends lifted admiration and affection for those--like the great poet Biagio Marin who lived in Grado in the lagoons, Don Girotto the archpriest of Revigliasco and the academic and novelist Stefano Jacomuzzi of Cambiona in the Collina--whose lives and writings invoke "the big picture of the infinite, against which all human experience is set," foster the humility of "the smallness of oneself" and of "letting go," promote the conquest of the "vanity" of "taking oneself too seriously" and of "the obsession with impotence" of the "deliriums" of time and indicate a freedom from "fear" of "the vacuous pomp of the world" and above all of death. In a voice of the distilled wisdom of the ages, Magris tells us: "We die because we forget we are immortal." Without the humility of immortality, we succumb to vanity and death or "the darkness in which 'metaphors die'": "Perhaps this is original sin, the inability to live and love, to live time, each instant to the full, without craving to burn it up, to use it quickly. Original sin introduces death, which takes possession of life, making life seem unbearable in every hour it proffers in its passing, forcing the destruction of life's time, trying to make

This is a wonderful, in-depth exploration of a corner of Europe that most people don't know exists. Over the centuries, Trieste and the surrounding region have been a cultural crossroads; as the border between Italy, Slovenia, and Austria shifted, the city was transformed from a rather sleepy backwater to a major port, and back again. This amalgam of cultural influences has made the region unique, and, as a native son, Magris offers an insider's perspective. But this isn't your average travel book; in a series of (mostly) short essays, he vividly portrays aspects of regional life ranging from the whimsical (the bear that never appears) to the gently ironic (Cafe San Marco) to the grim (memories of wars). In the final essay, where he envisions dying while walking in the city park, he revisits themes from most of the other essays and concludes with a memorable image of "life goes on." I found the book both enjoyable and enlightening as a glimpse into the Triestine mind-set, and I know I'll reread it.

This is a rather unusual book. Its genre is that of an essay collection, mixed with guide book, biographies and philosophy. The author tells us about his home town Trieste in north-eastern Italy and the surrounding regions: The inland and coast of Friuli (the region between Venice and Trieste), Piemonte in north-western Italy, the Istria peninsula in Slovenia/Croatia and Southern Tirol in northern Italy. All in all, border region where Italian, Slavic and German cultures meet and mix. The author describes places, landscapes, towns and villages in an intense, reflective and beautiful way, presents persons with interesting, moving, comic, poetic and tragic fates, teaches us some history (certainly not dry), tells some anecdotes, studies some literature and philosophises about landscapes, persons, culture and life itself. The tone changes between dark, poetic and humorous. The main theme of the book is how people live their lives in a microcosm where ways of thinking, language, traditions, and arts are influenced by many cultures and peoples, some gone and some still around. It pays homage to cultural diversity and warns against homogenizing and ethnic cleansing, as in the Yugoslavian Civil War, which the author describes as "the most silly of all wars", and which went on while this book was written. Personally I think the book was very interesting, rich, farsighted and with a very important theme. Sometimes I felt that there were too much philosophy, but it is rather simple and an important part of the book. It is a very European book, dealing with Europe's great heritage of both disastrous border disputes and rich cultural exchange across the borders. For Americans living within borders drawn officially drawn on the map with a ruler this book could be useful when it comes to understand the rich and tragic aspects of Europe's diverse ethnic heritage. But I recommend it to everybody who wants to enjoy a cultural journey to an exciting corner of Europe.