El Danubio

*Danube*—described as "a marvelous journey through time and space"—connects with the *tourisme éclairé* (enlightened travel) of Stendhal or Chateaubriand and inaugurates a new genre that straddles the line between novel and essay, diary and autobiography, cultural history and travelogue. In the author's words, the book is "a sort of submerged novel: I write about Danubian civilization, but also about the eye that beholds it," and it was composed "with the feeling of writing my own autobiography." Landscapes, passions, encounters, reflections: *Danube* is the account of a "sentimental journey" in the manner of Sterne, in which the narrator travels the ancient river from its source to the Black Sea—crossing Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria—while traversing his own life and the stages of contemporary culture, with its certainties, hopes, and anxieties. It is a journey that reconstructs—like a mosaic, through the places visited and examined—the civilization of Central Europe and its immense variety of peoples and cultures. It captures them in the markers of grand history and in the minute, fleeting traces of daily life, identifying the precise underlying structures: the German presence, the weight of ethnic minorities and neglected cultures, the imprint left by the Turks, and the enduring Jewish presence.