The Danube Lovers (Spanish Edition)

The Danube, which has been described as "a wonderful journey through time and space," connects with the "enlightened tourism" of a Stendhal or a Chateaubriand, and inaugurates a new genre, straddling the novel and the essay, the diary and the autobiography, cultural history and the travel book. In the words of its author, the book is "a kind of submerged novel: I write about Danubian civilization, but also about the eye that contemplates it," and was written "with the feeling of writing my own autobiography." Landscapes, passions, encounters, reflections: The Danube is, therefore, the account of a "sentimental journey" in the manner of Sterne, in which the narrator traverses the old river from its sources to the Black Sea, crossing Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria, while simultaneously traversing his own life and the seasons of a contemporary culture, its certainties, its hopes, and its anxieties.

A journey that reconstructs, in the form of a mosaic, through the places visited and interrogated, the civilization of Central Europe, with the immeasurable variety of its peoples and cultures, capturing them in the signs of great History and in the smallest and most ephemeral traces of everyday life, and identifying the precise veins: the German presence, the weight of ethnic minorities and neglected cultures, the mark left by the Turks, the current Hebrew presence.

This work, which has been hailed as "a wonderful journey through time and space," connects with the "enlightened tourism" of writers like Stendhal and Chateaubriand, and inaugurates a new genre that straddles the novel and the essay, the diary and the autobiography, cultural history and the travel book. In the author's own words, the book is "a kind of submerged novel: I write about Danubian civilization, but also about the eye that contemplates it," and was written "with the feeling of writing my own autobiography." Landscapes, passions, encounters, reflections: The Danube is, therefore, the account of a "sentimental journey" in the style of Sterne, in which the narrator traverses the old river from its sources to the Black Sea, crossing Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria, while simultaneously traversing his own life and the seasons of a contemporary culture, its certainties, its hopes, and its anxieties.

This journey reconstructs, in the form of a mosaic, the civilization of Central Europe, with the immeasurable variety of its peoples and cultures, capturing them in the signs of great History and in the smallest and most ephemeral traces of everyday life, and identifying the precise veins: the German presence, the weight of ethnic minorities and neglected cultures, the mark left by the Turks, the current Hebrew presence.

product information: