Voices: Three Plays

by Claudio Magris, Paul Vangelisti (Translator)

Three plays, To Have Been, Stadelmann, and Voices, by the renowned Italian novelist and playwright Claudio Magris. Magris has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and has won the Erasmus Award and the Leipzig Book Prize, among others.

200 pages, Paperback

First published December 7, 1995

About the author

Claudio Magris was born in Trieste in the year 1939. He graduated from the University of Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978.

His most well known book is Danubio (1986), which is a magnum opus. In this book Magris tracks the course of the Danube from its sources to the sea. The whole trip evolves into a colorful, rich canvas of the multicultural European history.

He's translated the works of Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler, among others, and he also published essays about Robert Musil, Jorge Luis Borges, Hermann Hesse and many others.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm surprised to see such poor ratings for this little book and no reviews. I really enjoyed it. The vignettes he writes are clever, reflective, and mostly ring true to me. I saw the author himself talk about his work a few years ago and he struck me as a little self-involved, but what man (or woman) of letters isn't? The first piece of the work "To have been" is especially full of pithy axiomatic reflections about life in twentieth century central Europe. I think this book stacks up well next to his countryman Italo Calvino.