Indeed, the Danubian landscape evokes the past, which leads him to reflect thus: “Life,” paraphrasing Kierkegaard, “can be understood only by looking backward, even if it has to be lived looking forward…” So begins Mr.

Magris to challenge the reader with abstractions, yet this is what encapsulates the beauty of the book, which is a bold experiment in taking the travel genre to another level of introspection. This Austrian mind-set, both imperial and cosmopolitan, rooted as it is in a specific landscape, recognizes the “stupid nonsense” that is postmodernism, “while accepting it as inevitable.” In this way, he explains, the German language forever maintains the possibility to connote universal values. Whereas the Rhine, he writes, “is Siegfried, symbol of Germanic virtus and purity, the loyalty of the Niebelungs, chivalric heroism,” the Danube “is Pannonia, the kingdom of Atilla, the eastern, Asiatic tide.” More pointedly, the Rhine is about the “purity” of one race while the Danube, with its link to the Austrian Habsburg Empire, evokes a “supranational culture” beyond ethnicity. Magris is periodically mentioned as a possibility to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: It is primarily because of this one book, which is not even a novel. Every spot along the Danube provides an opportunity for him to unleash a lifetime of encyclopedic learning on the page. Magris is an academic from Trieste, that quintessential Central European city, although located on Italy’s Adriatic coast. But arguably the supreme example of this category is Claudio Magris’s “Danube: A Sentimental Journey From the Source to the Black Sea,” published in Italian in 1986 and translated into English by Patrick Creagh in 1989. Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1940) and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Mani” (1958) and “Roumeli” (1966) are memorable travel books in large measure because they celebrate erudition. Heart-stopping landscapes invite research into their history and culture, and books pile up in one’s library.

The real adventure of travel is intellectual.

Danube by Claudio Magris