About book Trieste And The Meaning Of Nowhere (2002)
I didn't like this so much when I read it about 7 or 8 years ago, but my friend Robin Hemley, whose opinions I value, thinks it's really good, so I'm going to have to go back now. I've been to Trieste many times, so maybe I'm comparing her discussions with my own memories and impressions. Maybe I need to write my own book for that, rather than critiquing, perhaps unfairly, someone else's...Okay, now (in 2013), I've just reread the book and find that it gets stronger as it goes on. The initial chapters still strike me is too light and airy, though, to be fair, the author does say that she prefers an "urban blur" to a detailed guidebook and that she knows this is going to be a somewhat self-indulgent book. This somewhat counters one of the rules that I know Robin gives to his students about nonfiction, which basically says that while in memoir writing the author can take oneself seriously, in travel writing one should take oneself lightly. Anyway, something like that. Morris says this is to be her last book and uses Trieste as something like a touch stone for reflecting on aspects of her life, so the book is something of a travel writing memoir, or a memoir disguised as a book of travel writing. The mixture seems to me to be a successful move on her part.The short discussion of Pula as a mirror of Trieste is enlightening, but the parts where she tries to characterize the Karst as Trieste's "permanent element of dissent" seems overly ambitious and maybe a little strangely conceived. The Karst was there first after all, while the city came later. If anything, Trieste is the Karst's element of dissent, but that's not really right either, it seems to me, since they've lived together in a variety of ways for a very long time.She seems least comfortable writing about Croats and Serbs, and there are telling little errors in the parts of the book where she tries to do this (there is no town of Vhr in Istria, and no church named San Spiridione in Trieste), and the discussion of "race" in Chapter Nine, while I understand what she's trying to do, just seems too free and easy to really do justice to the questions she touches on. Here the style leads the text into obvious superficiality and dilettantism.The emphasis on Trieste as a new city, and the observation, noted twice, that it was the nationalists/irredentists and fascists who tried to claim the city as fundamentally Roman and therefor Italian, are both correct, as is the counter-suggestion, phrased and rephrased numerous times, that the heart of Trieste is the "new" city created for commerce, cosmopolitanism, and Hapsburg imperial dreams, which began in the 18th century and ended, for the most part, in the early 20th.The leave taking at the end is appropriately light and good-natured. The glance towards the future, which will not include the author of this book, is smart and somber. The book is easy to read, that airy tone easing one through from beginning to end.
It took me a long time to get through "Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere" because it’s a dense book, full of centuries’ worth of historical lessons and anecdotes, and because Morris writes in a careful third-person style that’s very different from the zany, personal stories that are popular now.The time was well spent, though. Morris paints an interesting portrait of Trieste, a city I’ve never been to (and one which, according to a possibly apocryphal 1999 poll, 70% of Italians don’t realize is in Italy). She covers all aspects of Trieste’s history and culture, from the city’s Jewish Diaspora to the city’s relations with its Slavic neighbors.Just when the anecdotes start to get a little cloying and you’re starting to wonder where she’s going with all of them, Morris wraps up the book—her last, she says--with a magnificent chapter that explains why Trieste has been significant to her throughout the years. It’s a beautiful end to not just a book but an entire distinguished writing career. The final chapter manages to tell us a lot about both the author and the city, without being either self-indulgent or dryly historical. In my experience, that’s a hard balance to strike. It’s easy to tell your own story about a place, and easy to impart a history lesson, but very hard to make your own experiences interesting and relevant to a general audience. This book shows how that’s done.
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We savor those rare experiences when we discover a marvelous author with a lengthy bibliography. Jan Morris is such a find for me. As a fan of travel writing, how can I have overlooked her all these years? Looking forward to catching up on her substantial back catalog.I read this on a plane to Trieste. By the time I touched down, I felt I understood the town, that I had gained a sense of it in a way that effectively melds history, culture, geography, inhabitants, quirks, and features. On our first half-day in town, I referred to so many passages in the book that you'd think it was a travel guide. It's not, but I wish I could read a similar treatise for every place I've visited or plan to visit.
—Carol Smith
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". 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.My position toward this book is privileged, since I was born and raised in Trieste, and even though I haven't been living there for some time it's still my dearest town, the one I know better.As a consequence, places, people, views, feelings I know so well kicked in, in my memory, in such a powerful way that sometimes I felt like I was losing the point of view of the author. But maybe that's what makes the author so remarkable, because this has never happened to me before when reading about Trieste - she really managed to get into the very heart of this city, and report the very feelings it arises. I was particularly impressed by the fact that she perceived what in my opinion are two of the main ghosts that haunt me as a Triestina: hypochondria and in particular the sense of wanting something without knowing what, expecting something, wondering about oneself and the meaning of one's own life.I'm still wondering about the peculiar concept of nowhereness, that makes the title of the book, and that the author attributes to Trieste. I would like it to be true. And in part it is. I have the impression, though, that the author has somewhat idealized Trieste in this respect, in a way that's typical of visitors that don't actually live there for an extended, continuous time, dealing with the "everyday side" of a place. But maybe she just decided to leave that part out ... who cares after all? At the very end she admits to have portrayed nothing but herself, her Trieste. That's authentic enough.I highly recommend this book.
—Rossella
The author was captivated by Trieste from her first sight of it. I suppose, hope, we all have places that we fall in love with. Forever afterwards, whatever time we can spend there will be precious, we cannot read or learn enough about it, delight in meeting others who know the place. That's how it was for Jan Morris when he (it's complicated) first visited the city as a soldier at the end of the Second World War.After a lifetime in journalism, travel- and history-writing, this book was to be her swan song, she was to put away her pen, so to speak. So, into this rather small book she has packed a great deal. She does it in inimitable style. Trieste and it's place in history comes alive, as do the people who influenced it's course and still do: the Habsburg noblemen, merchants, financiers, insurers, James Joyce and his mistress, and even the well fed feral cats who have inhabited it through the ages. We know what they wear, what they said, where they lived and exactly where they lay in the sun.Several things make the book special. One is Jan Morris' staggering range of knowledge that illuminates every page. Then the amazing turns of thought she has, her fine observations, imagination and curiosity. Effortlessly, she switches from fey to bog ordinary. Kindness and sharp wit. Chapters of her life and philosophies percolate through this charming meditation. It is a unique book which leaves the reader enriched and wondering, yet with a yearning for something not easy to define... perhaps the meaning of nowhere.
—Judy
