Christoph Ransmayr book night

"I saw..." - is how he begins each of the seventy episodes of Christoph Ransmayr's Atlas, before unraveling the stories of each location in his unmistakably eloquent, poetically precise voice. And so begins a journey that covers distances as vast in the landscapes of the human heart and mind as on the globe. From the archipelago of the Pacific to the Arctic, from the rainforests of South America through Andalusia to the Mekong River, the Danube floodplain or Sydney, the images are dazzling, poignant and lyrically beautiful - the record of an extraordinary life of a great writer and a great traveller. Reading Lajos Adamik's Hungarian translation, we feel the snow-covered Himalayas, the gaze of a cow emaciated to the bone, or the pressure on the body in the deep sea, as well as the human destinies that are brought to life in the stories. "Much of what we think we know about the world we call our own we know only from narratives," the author reminds us in his foreword. There is hardly a richer map, guidebook and guide to our world than Ransmayr's.