Blameless

May 8, 2017
Magris’s ambitious novel, a fragmentary, densely detailed account of one man’s obsession with building a “Museum of War for the Advent of Peace,” is a collection of anecdotes about the evil that humans do and the banal ways in which that evil survives us. Magris’s narrator, inspired by a real-life collector of war memorabilia, grows up in the multicultural and cosmopolitan city of Trieste, Italy, where his early childhood games with toy soldiers impress upon him “the need to eliminate war.” He works as a translator for several parties during World War II and eventually amasses a hoard that includes spears, howitzers, submarines, ancient Zapotec weapons, “loads of uniforms, miles of movie film, reams of military documents, and... 2.8 tons of war posters and flyers.” But when the collector meets with tragedy—along with notebooks in which he may have recorded the names of wartime collaborators who were active in sending people to Italy’s only crematorium—the task of organizing the museum falls to Luisa Brooks, a local museum curator. Luisa’s notes on the collection are interspersed with reflections on history and passages from the collector’s writings. Unfortunately, Luisa, the daughter of a black American father and an Italian Jewish mother, never amounts to more than an excuse for Magris to dwell on the suffering of her ancestors. The scope of historical and literary detail that Magris piles up in defense of his theses is impressive, but the prose is ponderous and dwells on clichés.

March 1, 2017
Through an accumulation of devastating details, an Italian novel made up of stories within stories reveals truths about World War II and its aftermath that many (in the novel as well as in real life) would prefer to keep buried.In his new novel, Magris (Blindly, 2012, etc.) examines war as a universal force that pervades history and the very specific horror that enveloped his home city of Trieste after WWII. The novel's unnamed protagonist is an obsessive collector who was determined to curate a Museum of War, an establishment to promote peace, until he died in a fire in the process of fulfilling his ambition--likely an act of self-immolation. What remains of his legacy lies in his notebooks--at least the ones that haven't gone missing, perhaps burned in the fire. He took copious notes, and he named names: conspirators, collaborators, spies, casualties, even a rare hero (whose own story is open to dispute and revision). The pages that remain aren't in any order, at least as they're presented by Luisa, the archivist charged with fulfilling his mission by filling rooms with the artifacts that remain in the collection. Some of the chapters are descriptions of these rooms or of Luisa's plans for them. Some are taken from the protagonist's notebooks, his "scribblings that so agitated his heirs--though they weren't the only ones," and which Luisa presents in pretty much random fashion. Interwoven as a separate narrative thread are chapters headed as "Luisa's Story," a recounting of her girlhood in Trieste, of her Jewish Italian mother and her black soldier father, of the horrors in Trieste which no one mentions and which she discovers as if through osmosis--"there is an atrocity that one wanted--had to?--forget. In Trieste, on every street, I see the smoke that no one wanted to see." Like war itself, this novel reveals its ineffable mysteries though it resists being understood too easily.

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