Amid wars, failed revolutions and the shifting of frontiers, the bit-part players often have the best tales to tell – an astonishing, genre-blurring travelogue from Italian master Claudio Magris.
In the tiny borderlands of Istria and Italy, from the forests of Monte Nevoso, to the hidden valleys of the Tyrol, to a Trieste café, Microcosms pieces together a mosaic of stories – comic, tragic, picaresque, nostalgic – from life’s minor characters. Their worlds might be small, but they are far from minimalist: in them flashes the great, the meaningful, the unrepeatable significance of every existence.