“I dream of a European state with a true government, a federal state with common laws, because our problems are European problems first and foremost.” It wasn't a politician who came out with this in an interview with French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur but novelist and essayist Claudio Magris, winner of the 2001 Erasmus Prize, whose work has been translated and is read around the world. He was born in Trieste in 1939 and describes himself as a “border writer,” because Trieste is...