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Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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She also makes reference to both places having a “conscious sense of separateness”, due to their both being “innovative, technological place[s], not hampered by nostalgia”. While, in the end, most of the opinion stuff is too personal to be in any objective sense true, at least Morris is hip to her own jive enough to admit that. She introduces key personages in the city’s history, describing how they left their mark on the city, what they said about it, all of it recorded in a lyrical prose that really felt to me as though she was speaking to me alone, sharing her knowledge and her love for the place with me. Awkward, that, like one country came and took a slice of another country, and valuable sea access land no less. At the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste had grown to international importance as an entry point into Central Europe, so much so that it was referred to as "the third entrance of the Suez Canal".

So while this review may lack some depth of understanding, I hope my appreciation for the author and her work comes through. They are only shadows, now, though, these vestiges of Habsburg Trieste, like so much in this crepuscular city… As for the scenes in the Piazza Unità that day in 1897, I can hear the music still, but all the rest is phantom. Like a fly encased in ancient amber or a mammoth in the Siberian ice, Trieste is forever trapped in time. And something a friend of my mother’s once said, that has stuck with me since 16, about people distilling to the essence of who they are as they age, feels true rather than abstract now.A band is playing on a nearby bandstand, and “ the music of a waltz sets people flirtatiously swaying as they chat. Morris layers the history of Trieste with her own experiences and invites us to share her imaginings of what life there was like at its Habsburg peak.

As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. I have to say that a lot of this is rather eerily reminiscent of the history of Odessa that I read earlier in the year. Inside, I’m not the chronological age I am, but I know that the people who are the age I feel view me as that chronological age.She was also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere . Sometimes when I finish a book I have a strange feeling, sort of a nostalgia, a loss of a world, a "being sorry that the book is over". So until I read a few more of her books – “Spain” just arrived this week and “Conundrum”, her account of her transition from man to woman, is on my “to read” list – there are parts of this book that I may not have fully appreciated.

But then we get the exquisite melancholy of lost ocean liners, the absurd theatre of Mussolini's imperial delusions. We visited a few years ago now, and I remember people in Tokyo asking us where we were headed next on our trip only to laugh in puzzlement at our choice. It was there that Joyce wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and also where he heard an odd admixture of language ( sonababic meant son-of-a-bitch) that he absorbed and which served as the template language of Finnegan's Wake. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time.

It was usually good narrative that used to give me that feeling - until I read this book, the only descriptive travel book that managed to catch my heart and not my brain only. Trieste briefly took centre stage at the onset of the Cold War, when Marshall Tito claimed it for Yugoslavia; it narrowly avoided being enveloped by the Iron Curtain. Jan Morris seems to be trying to arrange or reconcile some aspects of her own life through her meditations on Trieste.

Antonio Smareglia in the shadow of the arena in Pula, the same Smareglia whose operas were staged at the Teatro Verdi, the same acronym VERDI which became a touchstone for Italian irredentism. I know very little about her life and work beyond what a few newspaper articles and her obituary tell. All that splendour still exists intact, but on the quays that once crawled with sailors and merchants from all over the world, dense with the sea-traffic of six continents, on the docks that morning I could see just one solitary vessel moored for fitouts. First, as mentioned earlier, I wanted to learn more about the craft and art of writing about places and journeys.Trieste belonged in that select company of the once mighty now brought low, but with enough evidence left over still to inspire bouts of melancholy, nostalgia and romantic regret. Egon Schiele spent time in the city, as did the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the French consul who wrote under the name Stendhal. Since then, the city has come to represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories. It seems that it existed on two planes for her – the real (when she was there) and the imagined (when she was away).

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