Essayist and novelist, winner of numerous prizes, Claudio Magris was born in Trieste in 1939. His works are translated all over the world. He is notably the author of “Danube”, “Le Mythe et l’Empire”, “Another sea”, “Utopia and disenchantment”, “Microcosms” and “Classé sans suite”. His new book, translated from Italian by Jean and Marie-Noëlle Pastureau, is a collection of short stories published under the title “Temps curved à Krems” in the L’Arpenteur collection.
“In Trieste and its surroundings, but also in Piedmont and on the banks of the Danube, a writer at the height of his art unfolds here five stories on the theme of old age. Could this age of life conceal a form of happiness? and secret freedom? It is a time when the horizon narrows, but when attention to the epiphanies of immediate things opens us up to a different relationship to the movement of the world. Old age, in the eyes of Claudio Magris, is also a time of withdrawal and furtive dissidence in the face of the share of social comedy that accompanies many human undertakings. Intertwining the said and the unsaid, ambiguity and irony, the short stories of Curved time in Krems vary the lighting on the “guerrilla warfare of old age”, a small but long-range battle, always waged quietly. The other major theme of the book is that of time and its enigmas, of its movement which leads both towards the source and towards the mouthpiece. The collection takes on the appearance of a small kaleidoscope unfolding five stories of admirable richness in the perception of destinies and the knowledge of the human.” (Presentation of Gallimard editions)