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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No to the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, I am nearly, pardon me, trembling with excitement and anticipation because our guest is the Italian writer,

historian, thinker, essayist, novelist, Claudio Magris. Many years ago, my very favorite American writer, many of you already know this, it was William H. Gass, and the book was The Tunnel, and I asked him for a recommendation of a book to read, and he recommended what was then a new book called Danube.

This book followed the Danube River from its mouth to the sea.

Through its centuries, its interpenetrations of cultural and historical events, because

it was once the belief that the road of empire was the road of the river.

He has written books since then, most recently, a very great novel called Blameless.

And this new book, Blameless, is like the others, rooted in a truthful moment.

In Trieste, there was a remarkable and distinguished man who believed that by collecting the weapons of war and putting them on display in a museum and arranging them correctly

so that they would comment on the human instinct for annihilation, that he would be able

to make a museum of peace to annihilation, that he would be able to make a museum of peace to annihilate war. But then this man

died in a fire, in a coffin, in the not yet laid out museum. So this is an imaginary assembly of his museum, of his

notes about humanity, and more than that, a young woman who was interested in all these things has been

selected to be the inheritor of his notes, his submarines, his bows and arrows, left to decide in her sleepless nights how she is going to

make good of her inheritance. Yes? Tell me about Louisa. Her name is Louisa Brooks.

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