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.

I was particularly drawn to the dreamlike structure. The narrator — who never refers to himself in the first person — slips between scenes, as if passing through the layers of a place, ventriloquising the patter of the residents and loiterers and fishermen and priests and writers who populate these localities. 

The flexible structure — which is established in the first chapter, set in Trieste’s historic Caffè San Marco — allows Magris to tuck sections of literary criticism, or reflections on the complex geography and history of his chosen places.

Magris’s focus on the layered nature of place frees him to interweave chronologies. A child, who could well be the author himself, carries an ailing goldfish through the public gardens. Could the child be the same man who, in the same chapter, seeks shelter in a nearby church during a ferocious storm? Before you know it, you’ve been drawn into someone else’s dream.

John Gardner, in his book The Art of Fiction, wrote that a successful piece of writing is like a “vivid and continuous dream” that is communicated to the reader. It’s a nice idea. Think of a book that you’ve returned to every night for a week or a month, or however long it might take to reach the end. You revisit a book as if it were an ongoing dream, so why shouldn’t it resemble one?

There are plenty of people who will tell you how to write a book but nobody who can dream it on your behalf. You might start out using other writers as your model, at least consciously. But what results from your first and perhaps subsequent attempts may not resemble that model at all; it’s more likely that it’ll be some strange combination of influence and originality. 

Over time, your own approach will begin to dominate. The rules that you thought you had to learn seem, over time, less relevant to what you’re doing. A sense of experiment becomes necessary for you to progress as a writer, and it’s then that the dream and the structure might begin to unite.

Structure is essential in writing. It can come from very careful planning, or it can emerge from the writing itself. 

You can plan too stringently and kill the spark that’s necessary to make a piece of writing come alive; under-planning comes with its own risks — what happens after 300 words when you find yourself stuck? — but over time you learn to embrace a degree of spontaneity.

“Life is neither good nor bad; it is original,” the Trieste novelist, and friend of James Joyce, Italo Svevo wrote (in the novel Zeno’s Conscience, quoted here in a translation by Beryl de Zoete). Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to subordinate that originality, and at that point, your writing entwines more closely with the way you think, whether that be fragmentary and strange or coherent and obsessive; eventually, the originality of life can’t be contained by a structure borrowed from someone else.

Voices

One thing I noticed about Magris’s approach is that it enables him to play with factual material in an interesting way. He can absorb other voices without having to trot out proof that a person was talking to him. The author is both a recording device and a ventriloquist. 

His concentration on reproducing voices allows him to take a conversation he’s had that morning and put it on the same footing as an account of a village festival written in the nineteenth century: both are happening in the present tense of the narration and are being channelled, and shaped for effect, by the writer.

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The author’s choice to stand back a little from the narrative — to refer to the collective ‘we’ when talking about experiences that I would guess were almost certainly gathered during family holidays, or to anonymise his presence during certain scenes through use of the third person — has the slightly illusory effect of placing his own voice on the same level of those he quotes. 

It also smooths out the disjunctions one might encounter when bringing together reportage with historical material. In this way, the multi-layered, multi-voiced place can reveal itself through traces and murmurs.

MAGRIS feels no need to explain himself at every turn; instead, he tends towards the enigmatic and the book benefits from this decision, gathering an emotional undertow which crests memorably near its conclusion. His approach has carved out space for a vividly imagined, deeply spooky scene in which past and future encounter one another. 

It’s a work of imaginative nonfiction in which the fabric of the actual is interwoven with the fabrications of the possible and the potential. As the book’s originality reasserts itself for the final time, life becomes a dream.

Lessons

I didn’t read Magris’s book to take away any lessons — but sometimes we end up being unexpectedly taught something, which is probably the best way to learn anything. What can we take from it? 

Perhaps it might be a question of being bolder in our decisions as writers, about trusting the reader to come with us. But it’s also about how we might establish a mode of narration that can adequately incorporate the variety of material we want to use. With that approach comes a flexibility that the author can use to explore the more imaginative implications of writing.

As readers we’re used to memoirs being recounted, to borrow a cinematic term, in close-up, as if subjective personal experience inescapably dictates our relationship to ourselves and the world. Hence the tendency for memoir to either collapse into a narcissistic trap or for the form to be grafted onto an off-the-shelf heroic plot. Yet the self exists in relationship to others and the world.

We experience others and the world both directly (through what happens to us in our everyday lives) and indirectly through accounts supplied by others (you read a historical textbook and that becomes part of your day; or, while stopped at a red light on your bike, a delivery man on a moped tells you briefly about what he’s up to before zooming off).

So, you decide, as a writer: What should I include and what shouldn’t I? And should ‘I’ be part of this book at all? In Microcosms, the ‘I’ is dissolved into the book, enabling the writer to be present perhaps more fully and complexly than he would have been in a traditional memoir. 

It’s still about the world as the author experiences it — familiar places, memories, people. The world may contain us, but we contain the world.

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