Book review: Dreams and the stories we tell 

There are plenty who will tell you how to write a book but nobody can dream it on your behalf, writes Karl Whitney

Italian writer Claudio Magris feels no need to explain himself at every turn in his deeply imaginative work of nonfiction, Microcosms. Photo: Hector Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images

WHEN you sit down to write, you can have a carefully drawn plan for where you’re meant to go, but invariably the process will end up taking you somewhere unexpected. Many writers mention how absorbing a period of intense writing can become, of how it can feel like they disappear — at least for a short while — during that absorption. Sometimes I wonder if writing is like dreaming.

Recently I’ve been reading the work of the Italian author Claudio Magris, specifically the book Microcosms, a deeply imaginative work of nonfiction that features many of the techniques one might expect to encounter in fiction. Focusing on a variety of locales — mostly in the northeast of Italy and the countries that border his native Trieste — the book is a multi-layered, many-voiced distillation of place.