Bookshops will, one hopes, order many copies of Trieste. Not simply
because it's a beautiful meditation on a suggestive subject; but
because it's two kinds of book, and belongs on two different
shelves. Primarily it is a travelogue. But, at a deeper level, it's
autobiography. This small 'free port', 'open city', and 'home of
exiles' on the Adriatic is an image for the author herself.
Himself, as James Morris was, when he first went there, as a
British officer, in 1946 (true to its history, there was a
tug-of-war as to which side of the Iron Curtain Trieste would fall
after World War II). As Morris says in her epilogue: 'Much of this
little book has been self-description. For years I felt myself an
exile from normality.' For those coming to Morris for the first
time, the book is prefaced by 'A Necessary Explanation': 'Jan
Morris lived and wrote as James Morris until she completed a change
of sexual role in 1972.' In other words, 'Trieste, c'est moi'.
Exile can be stimulating but is always unhappy. The name Trieste
carries with it an accidental association with 'tristesse'. As
Morris puts it: 'Aristotle, I have been told, believed that every
interesting man possessed a streak of melancholy. I feel the same
about cities. Melancholy is Trieste's chief rapture.' Bonjour
Trieste. As a travel book, Trieste is entertaining - primarily for
the fascinating vagrants who have, usually in transit, called it
home. Two great writers dominate: James Joyce and Italo Svevo.
There are lesser glories. I did not know, for example, that Sigmund
Freud spent time there, doing research on the sexual propensities
of eels. As Morris observes, the young women of Vienna turned out
to be richer territory. Review by John Sutherland (Kirkus UK)
Jan Morris (then James) first visited Trieste as a soldier at the
end of the Second World War. Since then, the city has come to
represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves
and memories. Here, her thoughts on a host of subjects - ships,
cities, cats, sex, nationalism, Jewishness, civility and kindness -
are inspired by the presence of Trieste, and recorded in or between
the lines of this book. Evoking the whole of its modern history,
from its explosive growth to wealth and fame under the Habsburgs,
through the years of Fascist rule to the miserable years of the
Cold War, when rivalries among the great powers prevented its
creation as a free city under United Nations auspices, Trieste and
the Meaning of Nowhere is neither a history nor a travel book; like
the place, it is one of a kind. Jan Morris's collection of travel
writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such
titles as Venice, Coronation Everest, Hong Kong, Spain, Manhattan
'45, A Writer's World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy. Hav, her
novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C.
Clarke Award.
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