Five weeks after the New York Times dismissed Magris’s work, the first sections of the Berlin Wall fell, and it became apparent that their river of history was also ours. As the leftwing’s belief in the old verities of Marxism disintegrated, a new vision of Europe was growing. In the purportedly barbaric backwaters of the Soviet imperium there was a rising ferment of dissent and discussion about what society and politics should be, and what their countries could be, as voiced by groups ranging from Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 to Poland’s Solidarity movement. It only sends its Nibelungen to the east to get them massacred by the hordes of Attila.” The New York Times reviewer tellingly declared his preference for the Rhine as the river of civilisation, “closer to our western world and to our history. When Danube was published in English, in 1989, the influential American Kirkus Reviews called the book “heavy-going” in its description of what it termed “this little-known (at least to most Americans) corner of Europe”. Ignorance always summons greater ignorance in its defence. Written during the final efflorescence of the cold war – when, as we now know, the world came the closest it has ever been to a nuclear war – the countries of what was then called eastern Europe had become, after four decades of isolating Soviet rule, terra incognita to many in the west. To the small list of great river books I would add Claudio Magris’s Danube, which, like Huckleberry Finn, seems to be slyly inventing something profoundly new, while all the time pretending to be simply retelling stories that gather along the course of a river.ĭanube was originally published in Italian in 1986, the same year Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the Soviet Union to two new concepts: glasnost and perestroika.

Claudio magris danubio