Blameless

by Claudio Magris, Anne Milano Appel (Translator)

Overview

From one of Europe’s most revered authors, a tale of one man’s obsessive project to collect the instruments of death, evil, and humanity’s darkest atrocities in order to oppose them
 
“It’s an attractive trait in Magris that he so obviously can’t resist a good story. . . . Blameless, wonderfully translated by Anne Milano Appel, succeeds as a prayer for mercy and reason in a world of torturers and whitewashers.”—Neal Ascherson, New York Review of Books
 
Claudio Magris’s searing new novel ruthlessly confronts the human obsession with war and its savagery in every age and every country. His tale centers on a man whose maniacal devotion to the creation of a Museum of War involves both a horrible secret and the hope of redemption. Luisa Brooks, his museum’s curator, a descendant of victims of Jewish exile and of black slavery, has a complex dilemma: will the collections she exhibits save humanity from repeating its tragic and violent past? Or might the display of articles of war actually valorize and memorialize evil atrocities?
 
In Blameless Magris affirms his mastery of the novel form, interweaving multiple themes and traveling deftly through history. With a multitude of stories, the author investigates individual sorrow, the societal burden of justice aborted, and the ways in which memory and historical evidence are sabotaged or sometimes salvaged.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300218480
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters Series
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Claudio Magris, professor emeritus of modern German literature, University of Trieste, is a recipient of the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, the FIL Prize Guadalajara, and the Kafka Prize among scores of other literary awards. His best-selling novel Danube has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Anne Milano Appel, an award-winning translator, recently received the Italian Prose Translation Award.

Editorial Reviews

05/08/2017
Magris’s ambitious novel, a fragmentary, densely detailed account of one man’s obsession with building a “Museum of War for the Advent of Peace,” is a collection of anecdotes about the evil that humans do and the banal ways in which that evil survives us. Magris’s narrator, inspired by a real-life collector of war memorabilia, grows up in the multicultural and cosmopolitan city of Trieste, Italy, where his early childhood games with toy soldiers impress upon him “the need to eliminate war.” He works as a translator for several parties during World War II and eventually amasses a hoard that includes spears, howitzers, submarines, ancient Zapotec weapons, “loads of uniforms, miles of movie film, reams of military documents, and... 2.8 tons of war posters and flyers.” But when the collector meets with tragedy—along with notebooks in which he may have recorded the names of wartime collaborators who were active in sending people to Italy’s only crematorium—the task of organizing the museum falls to Luisa Brooks, a local museum curator. Luisa’s notes on the collection are interspersed with reflections on history and passages from the collector’s writings. Unfortunately, Luisa, the daughter of a black American father and an Italian Jewish mother, never amounts to more than an excuse for Magris to dwell on the suffering of her ancestors. The scope of historical and literary detail that Magris piles up in defense of his theses is impressive, but the prose is ponderous and dwells on clichés. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] richly enjoyable writer. . . . The prose gallops but demands that you read it slowly and thoughtfully, the author’s intelligence being resistant to summary.”—Allan Massie, Wall Street Journal

“It’s an attractive trait in Magris that he so obviously can’t resist a good story. . . . Blameless, wonderfully translated by Anne Milano Appel, succeeds as a prayer for mercy and reason in a world of torturers and whitewashers.”—Neal Ascherson, New York Review of Books

“[A] remarkable novel.”—New Yorker

“Through an accumulation of devastating details . . . Magris examines war as a universal force that pervades history and the very specific horror that enveloped his home city of Trieste after WWII. . . . Like war itself, this novel reveals its ineffable mysteries though it resists being understood too easily.”—Kirkus Reviews

“What [Blameless] takes on to accomplish is a staggering revision of how we see ourselves and the future . . . and just in the nick of time. We need this book very badly.”—Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm

“Admirers of Magris’ contemporary classic Danube will recognize the headlong advance of his prose in Blameless—discursive, allusive, the tone flat or neutral, then the pitch—and the stakes—suddenly raised.”—Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“The genius, the moral seriousness, of this book is that Magris is a realist and idealist at the same time: a realist about the constancy of war and an idealist about the need to oppose it. Meanwhile, the delicious vividness of his writing saves it from being preachy. . . . Periodically Magris is mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. He should get it.”—Robert D. Kaplan, National Interest

“[A] gorgeous columbarium of a novel.”—John Freeman, Boston Globe (Best Books of 2017)

“Reading this novel is an act of resilience and justice—just like writing it must have been for Magris. It is an invitation to us to re-appropriate historical memory. . . .  Magris turns our face toward the unknown. This is what great writers do. They push us into darkness. They know it is the only way for us to meet light.”—Sara Fruner, Brick

“This marvelous, monumental novel is at once an act of recuperation and indictment; despite the book’s title, Claudio Magris’s unnamed protagonist, like Magris himself, knows where the blame lies for the countless crimes of the twentieth century.”—John Banville, author of The Blue Guitar

“The American reader is privileged to be reached, finally, by this new masterwork of the great contemporary writer Claudio Magris, one of the most brilliant witnesses and creative chroniclers of our turbulent times. It’s a great honor to recommend this new literary message coming from one of our most acclaimed European writers, a trustworthy and seductive artist, a lucid and original observer of the contradictions and conflicts and solitude of the modern man. The book should be a dear and precious partner for all lovers of literature and art, for the acute debate around our common destiny in turbulent times. A great, golden gift for the enviable community of Claudio Magris’s admirers!”—Norman Manea, author of The Hooligan’s Return

“Claudio Magris is a writer of many talents: a novelist, an essayist, a man of ideas, and a learned traveler, in the style of the great writers of the eighteenth century. Yet he is absolutely modern and each book he publishes assures us that he is one of the greatest writers of our time.”—Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature

From the Publisher

“Admirers of Magris’ contemporary classic Danube will recognize the headlong advance of his prose in Blameless—discursive, allusive, the tone flat or neutral, then the pitch—and the stakes—suddenly raised.”—Ron Slate, On the Seawall

On the Seawall - Ron Slate

“What [Blameless] takes on to accomplish is a staggering revision of how we see ourselves and the future . . . and just in the nick of time. We need this book very badly.”—Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm

Bookworm - Michael Silverblatt

“[A] richly enjoyable writer . . . The prose gallops but demands that you read it slowly and thoughtfully, the author’s intelligence being resistant to summary.”—Allan Massie, Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal - Allan Massie

2017-02-24
Through an accumulation of devastating details, an Italian novel made up of stories within stories reveals truths about World War II and its aftermath that many (in the novel as well as in real life) would prefer to keep buried.In his new novel, Magris (Blindly, 2012, etc.) examines war as a universal force that pervades history and the very specific horror that enveloped his home city of Trieste after WWII. The novel's unnamed protagonist is an obsessive collector who was determined to curate a Museum of War, an establishment to promote peace, until he died in a fire in the process of fulfilling his ambition—likely an act of self-immolation. What remains of his legacy lies in his notebooks—at least the ones that haven't gone missing, perhaps burned in the fire. He took copious notes, and he named names: conspirators, collaborators, spies, casualties, even a rare hero (whose own story is open to dispute and revision). The pages that remain aren't in any order, at least as they're presented by Luisa, the archivist charged with fulfilling his mission by filling rooms with the artifacts that remain in the collection. Some of the chapters are descriptions of these rooms or of Luisa's plans for them. Some are taken from the protagonist's notebooks, his "scribblings that so agitated his heirs—though they weren't the only ones," and which Luisa presents in pretty much random fashion. Interwoven as a separate narrative thread are chapters headed as "Luisa's Story," a recounting of her girlhood in Trieste, of her Jewish Italian mother and her black soldier father, of the horrors in Trieste which no one mentions and which she discovers as if through osmosis—"there is an atrocity that one wanted—had to?—forget. In Trieste, on every street, I see the smoke that no one wanted to see." Like war itself, this novel reveals its ineffable mysteries though it resists being understood too easily.

Kirkus Reviews