If genuine writing is born from the desire to account for the copious inconvenience of living, then Thrän is a real writer. Thrän’s experience has taught him that what life boils down to is a series of dirty tricks, and so he has set out to keep a rigorous inventory of its outrages. Thrän, whom Magris describes as “a hypochondriac specialising in discourtesies”, kept for many years a kind of specialised diary called the File of Rudenesses Received, which, though unpublished, may be his finest work.
On the cover of his learned work ( The Cathedral of Ulm, an Exact Description of the Same, 1857), the printer, in a moment of distraction which seems to obey the remorseless destiny of Ferdinand Thrän, has forgotten to print the author’s name, which the librarian of the National Library in Vienna has added in pencil … Yes, there is undoubtedly something deeply satisfying about seeing one’s name on the cover of a new book, which makes the case of Ferdinand Thrän, the nineteenth century restorer of the massive cathedral in the city of Ulm on the Danube, particularly poignant and shocking, though not perhaps to Thrän himself, as Claudio Magris writes (in his book Danube): Hence the appeal of what used to be called vanity publishing, which I understand is doing rather well, even in what our paper of record likes to call “these recessionary times”. Indeed there is possibly still something at the least a little unsatisfactory about moving in a world of books and judgments about books without oneself having hazarded, or achieved, one. “A man who has not been in Italy,” wrote Dr Johnson, “is always conscious of an inferiority.” Perhaps, but he might as well have said, for his time and his circle, a man who has not been to Oxford or Cambridge, or a man who has not written a book.
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