Then, for more than a century after 1815, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the Napoleonic wars the region was incorporated into the magical-sounding but short-lived Kingdom of Illyria. For centuries Trieste was the main rival of Venice, over which at certain periods it held the upper hand in trade and political influence. Microcosms opens and closes in Trieste, the capital of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in the northeastern corner of the Adriatic, another region with a complex history of shifting borders and fluid allegiances. Has there been another politician ever who was elected on his name alone, and by an electorate whose allegiances ranged from ultra-Catholic to ultra-left? He held his seat for two years, until the election of 1996, in which he did not run. He also made a brief foray into politics, when in 1994 he ran for the Italian Senate on an anti-Berlusconi ticket and was elected by 70,000 votes, despite the fact that he made no speeches, appeared on no television programs, and did not put up a single poster.

He has translated many European writers into Italian, including Ibsen and Kleist one of his novels, A Different Sea, has been published in English. He is awesomely well-read, though his erudition is tempered by a determined intellectual playfulness his references range from Ovid to Hellzapoppin’, from Medea to Edie Sedgwick.

Magris, a highly respected scholar of German literature, is a native of Trieste, where he lives and works.

A literary meditation on what it is to be European? Perhaps-but it is more than that, too much, much more. A travelogue? Certainly not, though it does traverse northern Italy from east to west and back again.

A memoir? No, although it ripples throughout with remembered scenes and places. It is easier to say what Microcosms is not than to say what it is. On its publication in Italy in 1997, it won the Strega Prize, the country’s most important literary award, and became the year’s unlikeliest best seller. The South Tyrol is only one of the half-dozen borderlands Magris visits in his allusive, and elusive, sly, witty, sorrowing, and wonderful oddity of a book. Reflecting on the Alpine border region of the South Tyrol-long disputed by Italy, Austria, and Bavaria-Claudio Magris writes, “There are borders running everywhere, and one crosses them without realizing.” This might serve as a general motto for Microcosms.

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