Karl-Markus Gauß, an Austrian journalist with a genial wit and apparently endless curiosity, offers a literary and literal journey across the margins of Europe, wandering through dusty Slovak villages, the back alleys of Vienna, Siena’s tourist-packed Piazza del Campo and the musty volumes of the old European republic of letters.
Gauß forges an intriguing blend of travelogue, culture history and literary criticism as he searches out the forgotten wrinkles of European identity. His touchstones are the great writers who helped forge national identities in the Balkans, Romania, Silesia and elsewhere, and I found myself thoroughly charmed even though I’d never heard of most of them.
One itinerant Romanian poet, for instance, found himself living in a village in the hinterlands “in the surreal sounding position of foreign language correspondent for an English-Romanian meat canning factory”.
Gauß is a great observer, sketching the flea-market merchants, idle retirees and haggard beggars at each spot. In Brussels, he finds native Flemings and Walloons loathe to acknowledge each other’s languages while migrant merchants in the Vossenplein (or Place du Jen de Balle) market mix a fluent French-Flemish.
At each stop, I found Gauß revealing a Europe more layered, overlapping and fascinating than I’d imagined.
