Blindly by Claudio Magris
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Yale University Press, September 2012 Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly? Clearly a recluse and a fugitive, but what more of him can we discern? Baffled by the events of his own life, he muses, "When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread." |
From The New Yorker, October 22, 2012, p. 81: Blindly, by Claudio Magris, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (Yale). Written in a torrential monologue, this novel presents readers with the disconnected thoughts of a madman (that most unreliable of narrators), and depicts one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. "History is a spyglass held up to a blindfolded eye," he says at one point, perhaps summing up the novel's conceit. At times, he is a prisoner in Goli Otok, the hellish gulag where Tito condemned Yugoslavian fascists and, later, Stalinists. At other times, he is Jorgen Jorgensen, the adventurer and self-proclaimed ruler of Iceland, who explored Tasmania only to return to it years later as a convict. Or, maybe, he is both. As he reassures the reader, "It's History that's sick, that's taken leave of its senses, not me." The narrative is confusing and unstable, but the prose, which meanders through the crevasses of a complicated mind, takes off and reads like poetry. From M.A.Orthofer’s review in The Complete Review, September 2, 2012: “fascinating approach, impressively textured” “…the success of the novel comes in the musical counterpoint composition of the text. It’s not always easy to follow, and yet, like a piece of music, does easily carry the reader along.” “Quite a remarkable work, playfully amusing and deeply serious.” read more at http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/italia/magrisc.htm |
Penguin Canada, |
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The figurehead is another recurring motif. If in one sense it represents those who turn a blind eye, who look and move on, guarda e passa as Dante says, it is also the image of a humanity that having lost its way, continues to plow ahead sightlessly, gropingly through life’s seas in a singular act of faith. At times a blindfold is necessary, so as not to see fear and be able to go forward. The figurehead is also a lifesaver, literally and figuratively. A shipwrecked seaman can grab onto her wooden skirts and float to safety.In the end this journey through space and time is a story of senseless actions and wrongs endured and inflicted. Of revolutionaries and those who persecute them. Of victims and oppressors, hunter and prey, prisoners and their warders, the betrayed and their betrayers everywhere. And over it all the pall of silence, of shrouding the truth. By those unwilling to attest to it. Another form of the occhio bendato, of not seeing. | ||
Claudio Magris, born in Trieste, Italy, is one of Europe’s most renowned writers, essayists and critics. His work, translated into numerous languages, has won him worldwide acclaim and numerous awards, and he has often been mentioned as a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Professor of German Studies at the University of Trieste, Magris is a member of several European academies and has been visiting professor in many North American and European institutions. He served as senator in the Italian Parliament from 1994 to 1996. |
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