Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

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Visitors tend to leave it puzzled, and when they get home remember it with a vague sense of mystery, something they can’t put a finger on. A band is playing on a nearby bandstand, and “ the music of a waltz sets people flirtatiously swaying as they chat. So for the first half I was probably resisting the whole idea of such writing, hating Morris for her seeming conservative fondness and nostalgia for empire, and for writing about 90% about herself and her own feelings and only maybe 10% about Trieste.

A hundred years ago, Trieste was one of the most bustling ports in Europe but is now largely forgotten, even by Italians: though Trieste is the capital of the Italian province also named Trieste, 70 percent of Italians polled in 1999 didn’t even know it was in Italy!Trademarks of the Morris literary style - the use of sound effects to bring out the ambience, anecdotes laced with humour, and, above all, an affectionate enthusiasm - run through the book. Dá-nos a conhecer a galeria heterogénea de exilados ou forasteiros que buscaram refúgio em Trieste e que ali encontraram (ou não) uma certa paz: James Joyce, é claro, mas também Freud, Stendhal, Sir Richard Francis Burton e tantos outros.

So while this review may lack some depth of understanding, I hope my appreciation for the author and her work comes through.Each chapter is also prefaced by a photograph, sometimes referred to directly in the following text, sometimes illustrative of an aspect of the chapter. The way I think about it is, I’ve more of my life behind me than I have in front, and the years of feeling a responsibility towards getting it right, making decisions that impact on a relatively distant future, are turning into the years of living for the moment. But there is material enough in Morris’ book, questions unanswered and sites unseen, to justify future trips, many more of them, to Trieste. Over the course of her life, she published over 40 books – travel narratives, histories, memoirs, and fiction.

I would love to go back to Aomori, and the way Morris wrote about Trieste makes me think I’d enjoy visiting there, too. In the twenty-first century, Trieste streets are jammed like any other European city with a quarter of a million people. Morris uses the Welsh word hiraeth, a deep-seated yearning for home, similar to the German heimat, as talked about by Paul Scraton in Ghosts on the Shore, but not quite the same. This was the class of society that had, in my view, held the balance of civilisation everywhere, tempering the arrogance of the aristocracy, restraining the crudity of the masses.After all, when James Morris first went to Trieste he was an army officer ; now Jan Morris is a dear old lady and grandfather living in Wales. The Trieste of her mind was always the waterfront, always as it had been when Morris was there as a soldier. The books includes so nice passages, and one cannot avoid thinking about Maximilian and Carlota when reading about the Miramar Castle. In this book, she does all of that, and ties in some of the most significant part of her life's journey too.