Inside this book there is a beautiful novel. Inside this book there's also way too much historical trivia. (I say trivia not to denigrate the war criminals and horrors it depicts, but because these characters and their deeds are recounted in snippets and lists, presented as if they were trivia.) There's also many scenes or testimonials of WWI, WWII, and post-war horrors. You will occasionally lose several pages to some particular act of brutality you know is historical fact and it will disallow your concentration for some time--horrors are horrors and the effect us this way, therefore a dramatic text should probably use them sparingly both to keep the reader engaged and so as not to deaden us to horror through repetition.

The narrative does come together, explain itself and the amassing of related war trivia, in the end, on its own terms, as a pastiche of two characters' powerless to either renege or capture their own histories search though documents and information to come to some sort of terms with their place in history... Still, as I read I was often furious at the book for the incessant trivia and the battering horrors when they preempted, deferred, or weakened the slightly more traditional narrative. I'm not a technique hater either. I love experimental and postmodern fiction. But frequently Trieste abused technique rather than used it to scale new heights. This is a beautiful novel with some deep flaws in its experimental form, I think. Maybe I'm wrong. I actually want to be wrong, for the novel's sake.

I'll be writing about it for my newspaper and I'll publish the essay here after we go to print.


Here's the promised article:


Borderland literature: Daša Drindiċ’s Trieste


Borders, languages, national identities, and particularly nation states, are neither stable nor clear-cut. Case in point, the farthest Northeastern corner of Italy, the Friuli region and its largest city, Trieste. Like most of the regions of the country now known as Italy, the Friuli was a Roman province, a medieval semi-democratic duchy, and then by turns annexed by succeeding and overlapping early modern empires: the Austrian, the Kingdom of Hungry, the Venetian Republic, and finally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Since 1954, its been a region of the Italian Republic. From 1943 until liberation by the Allies in ‘47 the Friuli was, along with sections of what are now Croatia and Slovenia, part of the Adriatisches Küstenland, an SS-run vassal state of the Third Reich. Between liberation and opting to join Italy (‘47-54) the Friuli was an independent city-state protected by the United Nations. The people of the region have many mixed cultural identities: Italian, Croatian, Slovenian, Austrian, Catholic, and Jewish. Besides its own local dialect, the languages of all of the above nationalities are spoken in Trieste and environs as well as several overlapping and mixed dialects.

Daša Drindiċ’s 2007 novel Trieste (published in English in 2012 by Britain’s Maclehose Press) is a post-modern historical novel set in Friuli (despite its title the action occurs mainly in Gorizia and Nova Gorica). The novel beautifully and, at times, horrifically charts the family tree of its protagonist, Haya Tedeschi, (herself a cross-current of identities: Italian, Slovene, Jew) through the shifting political boundaries that sweep across the region during the two World Wars and the destructive and tragic consequences when state-sponsored nationalisms come calling in a soldier’s uniform. Alongside the traditional narrative of our protagonist, her parents and grandparent’s stories of WWI, her own WWII romance, the kidnapping of her child, and her years spent searching for him, the text is peppered with historical documents, bits of well-known poems and novels, and testimonials of the perpetrators and victims of the holocaust drawn from the Nuremburg trails and other sources. Like the novels of W. G. Sebald, lists, charts, and photos heighten the reality of the story’s background, making it difficult to dismiss as "mere" fiction. The artistry of interweaving fact with fiction will excite many readers. While I believe it to be an alluring technique, it also prompts my sole negative critical opinion of the novel: there’s a bit too much of it. I loved the story so much I sometimes grew impatient to get out of historical trivia and return to Haya and her drama. I felt this especially during the long section of short biographies of the guards at Trieste’s San Sabba transit camp.

Originally a rice husking plant, the Nazis transformed the San Sabba complex into, at first, a detention and transit center for deporting dissidents, partisans, and Jews to Auschwitz. Later, outfitted with a crematorium, San Sabba saw its own share of systematic, state-sponsored killing. Today the Risiera is an important Holocaust museum. Still, San Sabba is relatively peripheral to the novel’s plot and, although of great historical interest, I felt that it got more attention in Trieste than the narrative itself demanded. And, anyway, few things I have read have moved me like my own visit the Risiera museum.

Flaws aside, Trieste is an important and beautiful novel. I feel we will always need art that reminds us that our constructed identities are far from stable or singular and that the politics surrounding them will always lead to little more than divisive chaos. Each of us is far more than a skin color, a gender, a language group, a dialect, a city, a nationality, an ideology, or a flag. We also live in the fluidity of time, which will one day become history. Trieste confronts not only the horrors of Irredentism and Nazism and how national identities can torture and exterminate so many of its own citizens for a misguided and absurd sense of purity—as if, within the many crosscurrents of identity there could be any such thing! The novel also emphasizes our responsibility to our descendants. Trieste’s stunning final section deals with the irreversible damage done to the children of Nazi war criminals and, by extension, to European consciousness and culture of the following generation, because of the horrors committed by their fathers and mothers. More than anything else Trieste illustrates the danger of constructing national identities and imposing them militarily. We are human first and foremost; most of the rest is posturing.


Second reading:

This novel was better the second time through--both clearer and more aesthetically satisfying.

Obviously I was a bit annoyed at the percentage of historical info., testimony, and short biography on a first reading--much of this made more sense during my second reading as I knew where the story was going. Therefore much of the information seemed less casual because I understood better the thematic links between some information and the main narrative itself. A lot of that had to do with the female experience of World War II, which makes this novel very interesting. Since war is "man's work" and villains are most commonly male in novels--certainly more frightening because usually both physically and culturally more powerful than female characters--it's refreshing to read of not only the female victims of the Third Reich, the hardships of the innocent bystanders of WWII, but even some of the German women who participated in the monstrosities of the regime.

The final chapter was also much more pointed and satisfying to me the second time through. It seems to me now that a major theme of the novel is the paradox that we humans live mostly through text, history, narratives, and cultural context and yet we feel like free, self-defined actors and want to be judged on our own actions. Obviously a historical/cultural event as devastating and morally suspect as the Nazi movement opens up a legacy for the next generation impossible to accept, bear, or even stomach. Hence the desire to escape history in conflict with the longing to belong, to have a history and a culture behind one. The fact that in the final scene the two protagonists can only communicate by reciting lines from Eliot's "Wasteland" is a fit end to the story of these equally lost characters looking for identities in a mass of historical documents and ephemera. Identity is grounded in culture but is voiced by individuals, art, documentation. (It also explains the form of the novel and its need to present oodles of ephemeral information outside of the main narrative.) This might be the main reason history is always spun so positively by the "winners"--it's not the conscience of a nation, but rather the foundation of a culture meant to gift the next generation a positive birthright.

4th time through: Teaching it this semester it occurred to me (spoiler alert) that the whole thing is written by Antonio and that Haya is actually long dead. He only imagines she's there in Gorizia waiting for him. This explains all of the digressions: they are his research into his own past and the history surrounding it. Also why when he gets to Gorizia there's no reunion scene. Also the cannibalized literary texts--again, Antonio's piecing together of his family and his own past through literature as well as history--and perhaps imagination as well?

I love this novel more each time I read it.