A Different Sea - Softcover

Claudio Magris is the author of Danube, a work described as a masterpiece by a great number of critics, and which has been translated into most major languages. He has translated the works of Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler and currently lectures in the faculty of Literature and Philosophy at Trieste University.

Switching the symbolism of water from river, in the critically acclaimed Danube, to sea, in this new work, Claudio Magris successfully navigates the watery depths of society, the currents of history, and the tidal flux of human longing. The early twentieth century, with all its restlessness, uncertainty, and searching, is filtered through Enrico, a young intellectual. Following the teaching of his mentor friend and poet, Carlo, he seeks a life unfettered by social convention and uncompromised by falseness. Leaving his family and friends for the Patagonian pampas, Enrico submerges himself in philosophical and ancient texts, has various sexual encounters, tends sheep, performs bloodletting on sick horses and himself, all as attempts to discover life's purpose, while consciously draining true feeling and destroying connections. Even Carlo's suicide barely disturbs his self-imposed numbness. As he returns to the Istrian seashore, he floats further away from love and living toward isolation and nihilism. He is buoyed by life's tides, powerless. Lyrical, fluid, and mysterious, this book is wavelike in its advance and retreat. Magris has written an unusual story, one that rather than forming, slowly dissolves. The reader truly feels a hollow space open, and the vast sea, still unknown and human, still so much within us, swells forward, tempting us under. Janet St. John