Blindly - Hardcover

Magris, Claudio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067006856X ISBN 13: 9780670068562

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2010

Synopsis

Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly? He is clearly a recluse and a fugitive. It is Jorgen Jorgenson, the nineteenth-century adventurer who became king of Iceland but was condemned to forced labour in the Antipodes. But it is also Comrade Cippico, militant Italian communist, imprisoned for years in Tito’s gulag on the “naked island” of Goli Otok. And it is the many partisans, prisoners, sailors, and stowaways who recount the perils of travel, war, and adventure.

In a shifting, choral monologue—part confession, part psychiatric session—a man recounts (invents, falsifies, hides, screams out) his life, which has passed through the horrors, the hopes, and the revolutions of the last century and through widely different lands and seas.

Hailed as a masterpiece upon its initial publication in Italy, Blindly is a novel of highly original, poetic intensity, a Jacob’s Ladder reversed to descend into the nether regions of history and, in particular, of the twentieth century.

 

About this title

About the Author

Claudio Magris is a critic, journalist, novelist, and translator and one of Europe's leading cultural philosophers. His cultural and literary non-fiction titles have won him particular acclaim worldwide: Danube has been translated into more than twenty languages and Microcosms received the 1997 Premio Strega.

Review

"A subtle, intelligent, and delicate story that, like a work of filigrane, you can read as a novel of adventures. A magnificent book."—Mario Vargas Llosa (Mario Vargas Llosa)

"Blindly is an extraordinarily inventive, learned, poetic and entertaining dreambook, ranging over the world and the centuries and returning always to the prison island of Goli Otok It is surely a masterpiece."—John Banville (John Banville)

"I have read Claudio Magris's Blindly twice, in French and in English; but the real translation is his revelation of what is in his own words “the indistinct drama of life.” Never mind the literary ikon-busting Modernism, Post-Modernism. Not since Joyce’s Ulysses has there been great revelation of what the novel can be. Magris achieves this in fully realizing his own statement. The novel “is a voice that expresses not what we have consciously become but what we might have become and what we erupt at times, what we could be and hope and fear we can be.” Time-frame of this narration perhaps by a madman to the contemporary Confessor, the psychiatrist, is two centuries held in a contemporary mind adventurously, with ruthless insight and the cut and thrust of wit. Told by different people in different countries and under political edicts the “madman” in the splendid humanity of hubris: “I want to set the world right instead of trying to find myself a safe haven.”—Nadine Gordimer (Nadine Gordimer)

“Blindly ....is devastating and beautiful.”—Kirkus (Kirkus)

“The prose, which meanders through the crevasses of a complicated mind, takes off and reads like poetry.”—The New Yorker (The New Yorker)

“[A] fascinating approach, impressively textured...Quite a remarkable work.”—The Complete Review

(The Complete Review)

Winner of the 2013 Northern California Book Awards for Fiction in Translation. (Northern California Book Awards Northern California Book Reviewers 2013-05-22)

Winner of the 2015 Italian Prose in Translation Prize, sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association. (Italian Prose in Translation Award American Literary Translators Association)

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 067006856X
• ISBN 13: 9780670068562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400