There are so many WWII novels still being written, one would think it was nearly impossible for someone to come up with a fresh perspective on the horrors of the war. Drndic's Trieste is therefore notable both for quasi-documentary technique and the main subjects of the story, the war experience in Slovenia and the Lebensborn program. The thrust of the story revolves around the main character's search for her son, stolen away by his SS father. 

The novel is in two parts: the first describes the depredations of the war in Slovenia and the Adriatic coast of Italy. The author describes through her narrator the brutalization of the population, in alternating passages of straight storytelling and documentary evidence, such as a lenghty list of those murdered in one village. In the latter half of the book, the narrator 

"...makes a little file, utterly pointless. She writes out notes, arranges them, rearranges them, as if shuffling a pack of cards. I could play solitaire with these notes, she says, which, in a sense, she does. This dog-eared file, full of cracked photographs of people, most of whom no longer exist, becomes Haya’s obsession; over the year she supplements her collection, slips into it little oddities, terse news items which after two, three, four decades she digs out and peruses, as if grabbing at dry dandelion fluff, as if catching eiderdown in a warm wind. Pointless, pointless. Forgotten dossiers, sealed archives open slowly, slowly, and what emerges is no more than water dripping from cracked sewage pipes."

Her research leads her deeper into the history of Lebensborn, and the postwar silence around the program and its victims, the children. Ultimately, she uncovers the unsavory truth of the program after the war:

"By 2000 I had amassed my own file of the “case histories” of Nazi descendants, the descendants of the first, second and third generation of Nazis, big and little, known and anonymous, regardless, the symptoms are more or less the same, and my file kept growing, getting fatter like a goose I was ruthlessly fattening until it keeled over. In nearly every case I studied there was a similar pattern: the children and grandchildren of Nazis rarely faced the history of their families and their own story. Nazis, many of them with bloodstained hands, some condemned to death, some sentenced to years in prison, a sentence they often didn’t serve out, many who were never brought to justice, who went on working as physicians and judges, engineers and architects, living “distinguished” lives, these Nazis colluded in conspiratorial silence as weighty as a millstone under which life lies crushed beyond recognition and under which, by some inexplicable or, in fact, explicable miracle like Emperor Trojan’s goat’s ears, a grain of fragile truth would sprout here and there, truth that had a destructive, devastating power. It is incomprehensible that the children, the grandchildren, mostly asked no questions, that they still do not ask. But old photographs, unfinished manuscripts, hidden diaries surface; archives open, movies are made, books are written; the pebbles of history roll underfoot and in time our step grows less steady. Nazi, Fascist, Ustaša, Chetnik, regardless. Their germ has not been eradicated."

This is a remarkable novel--highly recommended.