Nick Thorpe's "The Danube"

I relish writing composed in the present tense and written from the first-person perspective. It’s a rare combination. The only New Yorker pieces written this way that I can think of are Whitney Balliett’s “Ecstasy at the Onion” (October 10, 1969), John McPhee’s “The Search for Marvin Gardens” (September 9, 1972), Anthony Bailey’s “Outer Banks” (May 25, 1987), and Cynthia Zarin’s “An Enlarged Heart” (August 18 & 25, 2003). The first part of McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (May 2 & 9, 1977) is composed in the first-person-present-tense. Books written in this style include Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme (1994), Eva Hoffman's Exit into History (1993), Gideon Lewis-Krauss's A Sense of Direction (2012), Morten Strøksnes’s Shark Drunk (2017), and the one I’m currently reading – Nick Thorpe’s The Danube (2013). 

Thorpe’s book brims with sentences like these:

Here on the fraying fringes of Europe, between the Greek and Roman ruins of Histria and the rising waters of the Black Sea, I begin my journey up the River Danube.

As I drive towards the delta from the west I see my first wind turbines, spaced out across the hills like dandelions, or the advance guard of a Roman army.

On a Sunday morning in Tulcea, I go in search of the imam at the mosque a little way up the hill towards the museum.

I leave Galați at lunchtime, closely following the Danube on the road to Brăila, my head humming with the red wine from the Greek reception.

I drive through sparse deserted villages which feel as though they have been unpopulated since the Romans withdrew, and reach the Danube in time to watch a blood-red sun sink through vineyards among the forested islands of the river.

On a wide meadow, a headland overlooking a sweeping bend in the Danube, just before the Romanian-Bulgarian border at Silistra, I catch sight of a man striding purposefully beside a line of blue and yellow beehives, evenly spaced like floats on a net across the river.

I arrive late in the evening in Ruse, and the first three hotels are full.

I see the camels of the Koloseum Circus first, then the big tent as I speed past on the main road.

I go there, I do this. What could be simpler? Yet such lines have the breath of life: personal experience recorded with the immediacy of an inspired snapshot. I devour them.