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Summary: An addition to my "At its center lies a lie"
Review: Anyone wishing a longer version of my opinion should visit the Society for Slovene Studies site (just type that into your search engine) and then go to Book Reviews. The review is a longer version of my complaint that Jan Morris's Trieste is a careless book.
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Summary: This is one of the most depressing books I have ever read...
Review: Apart from very colorful images of an imperial past under the Hapsburgs, this book is full of examples of why people chose NOT to live there. The author paints a picture of depression, disorder, melancholia, abandonment, a place of transit where people come but eventually find it too harsh an emotional climate to remain.And yet, she makes it clear that this city of one half million people offers attractions day and night to locals and tourists alike. If Trieste is such a depressing place, why wasn't it deserted long ago? Where is the bridge here? Like so many other cities large and small, Trieste has endured its cycles, good and bad, and has survived. I picture it as having matured into a wonderful spot on the Adriatic, within spitting distance of fabulous Venice and colorful Antibes. How Morris could have characterized it otherwise is beyond me. Only at the very end of the book---when, shaking my head, I was about to put it on the shelf---does she quickly turn tables and express how diversified Trieste is becoming---a center of culture, science, finance, transportation and more---and how much promise it holds. But up to that point, all she succeeded in doing was grinding it into the dust. Read the first and last 20 or so pages, or find another book about Trieste. This one, for the most part, was a terrible disappointment.
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Summary: S/He's a Real Nowhere Wo/Man
Review: If a certain city is one of your favorite places, it presumably means that you feel something about it that -- if you are a writer -- you wish to convey to others. That passion is missing from this book, which is an oddly muted tribute to a city I've always wished to visit. In addition, Jan Morris claims this will be her last book. Why should a good writer like her want to go out with such a whimper? TRIESTE AND THE MEANING OF NOWHERE is, to be sure, a competently written work. All the major themes are present, but the guts just aren't there. What about Sir Richard F. Burton squirming through his last years far from the scenes of his triumphs? What about James Joyce creating great literature while trying to earn beer money teaching? Then there is the withering irony of Hungary's leader Admiral Horthy, at a time when his country had had no port for decades, yielding his country to the Nazis out of craven fear. There is material here for a book that yet remains to be written. Trieste still sits there at the head of the Adriatic waiting for THE book to be written about it. Until such time, this is an adequate book, well written, but even below the author's standard.
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Summary: Gushing and splashing; signifying nothing
Review: It struck me, as I read this book, that everything recounted could, with a slight and proper change of name, direction, be applied to any hell hole on earth: Swansea, Des Moines, Sudbury. The modest yet empty fireworks of the prose conveyed no feeling, evoked no atmosphere, muddled every anecdote, and left one with all the symptoms of a severe Aspertaine overdose.
is anyone really drawn into this twaddle by means of the outlandish pseudo-intimate supposed dialog? It is as revolting as the rubbish written by for so many years by so many sensitive housewives in suburban Manitoba and mailed in to be read aloud on Morningside.
Trieste, one cannot help thinking, must really be an interesting and place; lost in some eddy of time and circumstance. But it is impossible to tell for sure from this book. If I did visit I would avoid Ms Morris, should I meet her.
Could having read Evelyn Waugh's travel books just before have prejudiced me? I hope so; in fact I re-read When The Going Was Good as an antidote to this.
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Summary: A lovely coda
Review: Jan Morris has written a book that conveys both the spirit of a city she loves and maybe the melancholy she feels at the end of her long career. It can be read as an allegory for a life of change and travel. She describes Trieste as being a city of many pasts, being at the edge of various expanding and contracting powers throughout its history, particularly as the main port for the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire. Today it is a city of memories and she evokes this reality with a writing style that remains true to the tight prose needed of a newspaper correspondent of fifty years ago. I recommend Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere as highly as I recommend the body of work that Ms Morris leaves us with. Dig into some of her less well known books and you will be rewarded with rare jewels.
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Summary: At its center lies a lie
Review: Jan Morris says Trieste is 'the natural capital' of a 'Fourth World,' whose citizens 'are never chauvinists.' Among them, 'you will not be mocked'because they will not care about your nationality.' They 'are never mean.' Her Trieste is 'as near to a decent city that you can find at the start of the twenty-first century.' She does admit that 'a lot of what [she] has written' comes 'from [her] own mind,' still what a curious view of Trieste, arguably the most hate-filled city in Italy. Much of the book is beautiful, because she writes from 'libidinous' love. That may explain how wrong she is. Can the besotted be trusted?
For antidotes to her beautiful lie, read Bernard Meares or A. J. P. Taylor. Here's a piece of corrective evidence about her "decent city." Today an alliance of Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the neo-fascist Alleanza Nazionale rules Trieste. The new mayor's very first official act was to restore to its place in the civic gallery the portrait of Cesare Pagnini, the podesta of Trieste under the Nazis. Pagnini founded the Guardia Civica, which guarded the trains taking Jews and others to even more efficient extermination camps than the one operating in Pagnini's Trieste. Said Eugenio Montale to a Triestine friend years ago, 'You in Trieste, do you still hate as much as you used to?' The answer in Trieste will, alas, always be Yes.
The book is beautiful, but at its center lies a lie.
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Summary: The Life of a City
Review: Largely bereft of landmarks that might attract a sightseer, and for much of the year buffeted by the icy bora sweeping down from the denuded limestone plateau of the Karst, Trieste is outwardly an unprepossessing place. But with deft strokes, septuagenarian Jan Morris, in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, depicts an exiled city in whose distinctive soul she has long seen reflections of herself. Isolated from mainstream Europe, Trieste lies on the coast of the tiny sliver of north-east Italy hooked over the top of the Adriatic. Hemmed in by the Giulian Alps to the north and the Balkans to the east, the city is nonetheless steeped in a past which, until the Great War, saw this one-time medieval fishing village flourish as a cosmopolitan seaport serving imperial Vienna. Some readers may blanch at Morris's fond remembrance of empire. But the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, put an end to all that, and half a millennium of Austrian rule rapidly came to a close. Trieste was cast adrift, passing in turn through the hands of Il Duce, the Nazis and the squabbling Allied liberation armies (in which a young Morris arrived in Trieste as a British soldier). For a time it was even an independent free territory under the auspices of the United Nations. It returned to Italy in 1954, but a 1999 survey showed that the majority of Italians are unaware the city is one of their own. Trieste remains the capital of nowhere. In absorbing the influence of different races, nationalities and faiths, this place of transience has become a melting pot in which such distinctions are at best irrelevant, at worst a nonsense. And so the author celebrates the civility of the metropolis, its laughing, gracious nature, its readiness to shun pernicious conformity, and above all its kindness. These are qualities she believes are shared by a special minority in every community around the globe, a diaspora she calls nowhere. Like her enduring Venice, written more than forty years ago and one of the first of her many books and essays about cities, this is a masterful evocation of a city, rich in perspective, language and understanding, almost faultless in fact. But it is avowedly a more personal book, full of tenderness and nostalgia. Trieste engenders a tristesse in Morris which recalls the hiraeth she has felt for her native Wales during a lifetime of wandering the planet, an indistinct yearning, suffused with pathos and sensual desire, for family, for homecoming, for something beyond here and now. In pleading the case for this cherished city of limbo and longing, that its existential remit is simply to be itself, Morris seems to be asking, in this her final book, that we afford her the same privilege.
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Summary: A sad and sweet book...
Review: Morris describes Trieste as a city of melancholy, not so much that it is depressing, but that it allows one to be sad in a way that other more agressive towns might not. One ruminates on the meaning of nowhere there and a learns that nowhere is really a little bit of everywhere. Nor does it hurt to run into Sir Richard Burton's widow burning his pornographic translations from the Arabic, or James Joyce writing poems while visiting prostitutes. Also there are many well-fed cats, dining outside the mayor's favorite restaurant, or in the desert of the surrounding area, the rocky stony Karst, licking up scraps of fish heads and spaghetti brought to them by the local residents. It is no longer one of the world's greatest ports as it was under the Hapsburgs. It is only the fifth largest port in the Mediterranean.
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Summary: A sad and sweet book...
Review: Morris describes Trieste as a city of melancholy, not so much that it is depressing, but that it allows one to be sad in a way that other more agressive towns might not. One ruminates on the meaning of nowhere there and a learns that nowhere is really a little bit of everywhere. Nor does it hurt to run into Sir Richard Burton's widow burning his pornographic translations from the Arabic, or James Joyce writing poems while visiting prostitutes. Also there are many well-fed cats, dining outside the mayor's favorite restaurant, or in the desert of the surrounding area, the rocky stony Karst, licking up scraps of fish heads and spaghetti brought to them by the local residents. It is no longer one of the world's greatest ports as it was under the Hapsburgs. It is only the fifth largest port in the Mediterranean.
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Summary: A twilight view of Trieste
Review: Morris' perspective on Trieste is unique on several counts: a seasoned and sensitive traveler, she has a deep affection for a city that doesn't rank high on most people's lists of favorite places; she's experienced the city as both a young man and a middle-aged woman; and she's well-read about the city's history and literary associations, but she uses her learning as the backdrop for direct experience of life in Trieste, rather than as an end in itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, both as an appreciative visitor's impressions of the city and as an account of Morris' elegiac musings late in an eventful life. On the other hand, having recently read Claudio Magris' "Microcosms," I was forcibly reminded that this book is Trieste from an outsider's perspective. It's a beautiful book and well worth reading, but, for the Triestine mind in action, read Magris.
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