A journey upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest
Eastern approaches 2013-12-20
Summary:
NICK THORPE is not the first author in the English-speaking world to write about the Danube. Claudio Magris wrote about travelling down the river during the mid-1980s and Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote about how he travelled some of its route half a century before that. Nick Thorpe is joining them with The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest.
Mr Thorpe could hardly be a more different chronicler from his two predecessors. Where Mr Magris was interested in literary history Mr Thorpe is interested in the everyday people who live on the river. Unlike Mr Leigh Fermor, who was only a teenager when he passed these ways, Mr Thorpe is a foreign correspondent who has lived in Budapest since 1986.
Mr Thorpe travels up the river, “like the sturgeon”, not down it. He starts in its marshy delta where the river flows out in a windswept land of Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians and Turks and in places you can only get to by boat. By car, foot, bike, boat and...Continue reading