El viajero del siglo nos propone un ambicioso experimento literario: leer el siglo XIX con la mirada del XXI. Un diálogo entre la gran novela clásica y las narrativas de vanguardia. Un puente entre la historia y los debates de nuestro presente global; la extranjeria, el multiculturalismo y los nacionalismos, la emancipación de la mujer. Andrés Neuman despliega un mosaico cultural al servicio de un intenso argumento, pleno de intrigas, humor y personajes emocionantes, con un estilo rompedor que ofrece a estas cuestiones un sorprendente cauce.

I've forgotten where I heard about this book and the specifics regarding its recommendation. Even so, I found it to be disappointing: a romance novel with philosophic touches rather than a philosophical novel containing a romance. ( )

A thoroughly enjoyable feast that is also intellectually engaging... A brilliant read... ( )

Imagine a bucolic village, one of relative isolation and which strangely defies the laws of location and time. Insert an urbane protagonist. Should we allow a masked nemesis? No, I am not referring to Hot Fuzz http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425112/?ref_=sr_2, fine film it is but rather than that the novel Traveler of the Century by Andres Neuman. This is the first of Neuman's works to be translated and it appears to offer the hubris on an early effort. There are two or three amazing aspects on display. Unfortunately, each situation is routinely abandoned after a few sequences and likely doesn't return for a few hundred pages.

Obviously Traveler is a nod to Kafka and the discussions within [b:The Magic Mountain|88077|The Magic Mountain|Thomas Mann|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347799215s/88077.jpg|647489] but it simply drags as it seeks definition. Definition is a nominal point as the prtagonists tryst under the enterprise of translation. It is too long by half and even disappointing there. The philosophy of the novel's first half gives way to the sex of the second. The reader does marvel at the deft debates, is centralization at odds with republicanism. Was an occupied Germany (by Napoleon) more at ease with personal liberty than Metternich's Holy Alliance? Well, of course. The chief characters are richly drawn and conflicted. The situation is nothing novel. That said my interest remained only with the barrel organist and his dog.
( )

Early in 1827, a traveller arrives in the small German town of Wandernburg, which is in some undefined (and undefinable) spot on the borders of Saxony and Prussia. He makes friends with an elderly organ-grinder, falls in love, unintentionally steals the heart of the innkeeper's daughter, has various strange encounters with crows, ice, post-horns, graveyards, barking dogs, and a wind that shakes the leaves and blows the hat from his head. And eventually he leaves town again. You get the picture: the symbolic language of this book leans very firmly on Wilhelm Müller's cycle of poems about a winter traveller, which Schubert set to music as the song-cycle Winterreise in 1827.

There's also a significant nod to another famous German plot - the young woman the poetic traveller falls in love with turns out to be engaged to the fine, upstanding son of a local landowner, and out of loyalty to her widowed father she can't break that engagement.

And there's a lot more to this book than that. In a similar way to what Thomas Mann did in Lotte in Weimar, Neuman uses the generous framework of a nineteenth-century novel, where there is space for detailed literary, political and philosophical discussions and for plenty of sub-plots and minor characters, to give us a closely-detailed idea of what Europe was like at that particular moment in history, a moment which he clearly sees as being relevant to our own times. His main characters are young people who have grown up reading Voltaire, Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft and believe that everything is possible. But they find themselves living in a world where there are still kings and priests and policemen and censors, the European ideal has disappeared into petty nationalism, and the only rights that the state seeks to protect are those of landowners and employers. OK, maybe there are a few parallels there!

Neuman's method isn't quite as crude as that, of course - he musters his evidence carefully and takes us through all the poets and philosophers we need to make sense of all that. For the most part he sticks to his chosen chronology, although he does take some minor liberties with time, giving his characters access to books that probably would have taken a few more months to get to a place like Wandernburg, or allowing them to boast about having travelled on railways that were then still under construction.

Neuman also takes some pains to show us why so many people felt in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars that Europe needed order, authority and religion, but he rather undermines this side of the case by making all his conservative characters ultimately reveal themselves as either evil or foolish.

There are some odd little anachronistic titbits thrown in to provide a bit of postmodern Verfremdungseffekt - the two young rebels at the centre of the story are called Hans and Sophie (so we know they aren't going to beat the system, and we have our little doubts about which system it is); the two policemen who share a name seem to have been borrowed from Tintin; the Spanish character has the surname Urquijo and his late wife was called Ulrike - both names that could have been around in 1827, but are more likely to make modern readers think about 20th century news stories. And of course there is a lot more sheer physicality around than there could be in a nineteenth-century novel - sex, body-odour, urinating dogs, and all the rest of it.

The central part of the story has Hans and Sophie collaborating on a poetry translation project, with a lot of reflections on what literature is for, whether and how far translation is possible, and why we need to be aware of literature in other languages. Neuman has to use a certain amount of literary sleight-of-hand here, because he's writing in Spanish about people who are supposed to be working in German, inter alia translating Spanish poetry. And of course the oddity of that comes over all the more if Spanish isn't your first language, and you find yourself reading Keats, Nerval, Pushkin or Heine in a Spanish that you are supposed to take as German! But he seems to get away with it, somehow. It must have been a nightmare for anyone translating the novel, though...

A fascinating, mind-bending and very immersive reading experience. And another book I'm going to have to re-read some day. ( )