The pen is mightier than the cow
Roger Clarke
A DIFFERENT SEA by Claudio Magris Harvill, £12.99, pp. 104 Claudio Magris, an academic from Trieste, wowed the usually sedate world of travel-writing with his book Danube — one of the most cerebral travel- ogues ever written. There is a similar slant to his first attempt at fiction. Set in the same geographical area, it involves the same sort of characters — maudlin poets, eccentric academics — that peopled his earlier journey through Eastern Europe.
Magris has written a very clever, very modish Italian novel, influenced by Eastern European literature. He has included all the ingredients of the 'European novel' a heavyweight literary subtext, a fascination with language and ideas. He even leaves little love-notes in the text for his translator. The narrative is only marginally linear, and the tone toneless and unengaged. It is self-consciously 'poetic', insofar as it confuses lists of colours with poetry.
There is a strong story in there some- where. The main character of the book, Enrico, is born in 1886 in part of the Aus- tro-Hungarian Empire. He grows up as an earnest student who suddenly throws it all UP to go to Patagonia and ride around the pampas, pretending to be a gaucho herding cattle. His friends back home, particularly one called Carlo, are brimming with admi- ration with this attempt to grapple with real life. But unexpectedly Carlo commits suicide while Enrico is abroad, leaving nothing behind but a sheaf of poetry. In the years leading up to his own death in the 1950s, Enrico is increasingly overshadowed by Carlo's growing posthumous reputation. The central irony, then (though it is not treated 'ironically'), is that Carlo died thinking he was a failure while Enrico was considered the life-enhancing, heroic type. In fact, the opposite turns out to true, and Enrico spends his long, impoverished life reflecting on this fact. Rather than being nourished by literature and ideas, he is ennervated by them.
Women and sexual relationships are coolly observed in a style reminiscent of Kundera, but with little of Kundera's abili- ty to chill and delight. Enrico is always nose-deep in Greek and German classics, bookmarked with banknotes (from his teaching) or an early letter from Tolstoy, inviting him to distribute his possessions and join his commune. Magris feels obliged to tell us the publication details of Enrico's reading, so there are sentences like 'Enrico opens Oedipus the King, the Berlin edition of 1865 — text by Nauck and commentary by Schneidewin'. Other Italians who have chosen this inky route -- Calvino, Calasso, even Eco — have shown a lighter touch with their learning.
The first half of the novel is taken up with Enrico's journey to Argentina, and his cowboy-style existence. It might almost be seen as a 'The Great European Novel' striking outwards into 'The Great Ameri- can Novel' (i.e. name-dropping meets ham-
acting); but the encounter is a damp squib and many of the details (such as drinking horse's blood to stave off thirst) frankly ludicrous. However, Magris has no apologies about the `make-believe', non- naturalistic aspect of the adventure; this is a post-modernist novel, and he has a library in his head to prove it.
The second half of the book, with Enrico eking out a spartan existence on the shores of the Mediterranean, has more substance, even though by this point Enrico is little more than a ghost, obligated to memory and longing for extinction. The world moves on around him; the forces of fascism and Tito come and go.
After a promising beginning, Magris' inflected style inhibits any sense of move- ment; A Different Sea often gives the sensa- tion of being overcut, trawled through too relentlessly by the author himself. I also found his literary allusions uninteresting (he doesn't produce rare and exciting texts for us — only rare editions), and his grap- pling with certain philosophical questions lacklustre. This is a slow, self-referential novella, glittering with ideas, an aphoristic over-gilded ship built to be fast but weighed down with bulky intellectual accre- tions. All the flashes of brilliance (and they are there) swiftly fade beneath the elabora- tions, rhetoric and cunningly disguised padding. The book has the appearance of being something rare and special, but is in fact dull and strained.
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