River books are forever about lighting out for the territory, as Huck puts it.

And there comes a moment in every river book where we are confronted with
a great question: what is the price of our soul? Huck must decide whether to
turn in Jim, the escaped slave, or damn his soul by which Twain really
means save it, by defying the conformity to rules and society that otherwise
cripple and deform us.

To the small list of great river books I would add Claudio Magriss Danube,
which, like Huckleberry Finn, seems to be slyly inventing something
profoundly new, while all the time pretending to be simply retelling stories
that gather along the course of a river.

Sign up for the Bookmarks email

Read more

Danube was originally published in Italian in 1986, the same year Mikhail
Gorbachev introduced the Soviet Union to two new concepts: glasnost
and perestroika. Written during the final efflorescence of the cold war when,
as we now know, the world came the closest it has ever been to a nuclear war
the countries of what was then called eastern Europe had become, after four
decades of isolating Soviet rule, terra incognita to many in the west.

Ignorance always summons greater ignorance in its defence.

When Danube was published in English, in 1989, the influential
American Kirkus Reviews called the book heavy-going in its description of
what it termed this little-known (at least to most Americans) corner of
Europe. The New York Times reviewer tellingly declared his preference for
the Rhine as the river of civilisation, closer to our western world and to our
history ... It only sends its Nibelungen to the east to get them massacred by the
hordes of Attila.

In the purportedly barbaric backwaters of the Soviet imperium there was a

rising ferment of dissent and discussion about what society and politics should
be, and what their countries could be, as voiced by groups ranging from
Czechoslovakias Charter 77 to Polands Solidarity movement. As the leftwings
belief in the old verities of Marxism disintegrated, a new vision of Europe was
growing. Five weeks after the New York Times dismissed Magriss work, the
first sections of the Berlin Wall fell, and it became apparent that their river of
history was also ours.