Blindly

"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 * 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 *

Claudio Magris has been a professor of Germanic studies at the University of Trieste since 1978. He is the author of Danube, a best-selling novel now translated into more than twenty languages, and in 2001 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize. He has translated into Italian the works of such authors as Ibsen, Kleist, Schnitzler, Buchner, and Grillparzer. Anne Milano Appel is a professional translator. Her translation of Stefano Bortolussi's novel Head Above Water was the winner of the 2004 Northern California Book Award for Translation.