2024-01-16 18:37:34
at MARA GERGOLET
The book that draws on border geography and stories in a narrative of crossed destinies and ancient secrets hidden in a sentence is published by Feltrinelli
You don’t know anything. It is this phrase, which returns several times like a secret plot, a thread that binds the various protagonists who pronounce it while throwing it at each other, the trace of the path that Alma takes in her memories and in her city, Trieste. To try to understand who her father was but, it would be better to say, almost forced to do so, given that this much loved and elusive father left her an inheritance – a light wooden box – in the hands of a friend, or an ex-lover , which Alma has not seen for thirty years and would no longer want to see again.
Federica Manzon has written a powerful novel with Alma (Feltrinelli), which has Trieste as its backdrop. Or rather, which can take place – like other novels by her – only in this city that is being abandoned and marginal due to its very geography, where foreignness is “a distinctive, obstinate and flaunted trait”. And which is on the other side of the Balkans, in a privileged observation point over so much history, the first landing place of the West. The book is the story of a family and its three generations. The bourgeois grandparents – he a famous Germanist, the grandmother who does not disdain frivolity – who take her to the Caffè San Marco, who live on the avenue of plane trees among Baccarat glasses and ironed sheets and chocolate with cream, who call her Schatzi, darling in German; the mother who rebels against so much order, so much clarity and superiority by going to work in the City of Madmen and marrying a character with no past, who comes from there and who works – but no one knows exactly how – with the Marshal Tito, condemning himself to a life of precariousness on the Karst.
And then there is Alma, with the talent for disappearing quickly without leaving a trace (“and this is where her charm lies”) like her father, and for transforming facts into stories – she will become a journalist of some importance – without telling anything of self. And Vili, a thin boy from Belgrade, the son of dissidents who his father will bring (to save him?) into the family. And that he will begin a life of pretenses.
As in a roman a clef, Alma in her three days of return to Trieste – between Good Friday and the Easter of Resurrection – reluctantly searches for an answer or multiple questions, and we, reading, search for them with her. Part of the fun of the book – almost an intellectual game – is also deciphering who these characters are: whether the famous Germanist is inspired by what really lives in the city, or who the great Balkan correspondent of the local newspaper is. Even more so since the sons of the city – from Bobi Bazlen to Franco Basaglia – appear as quotes or characters in flesh and blood. But Trieste is also this side: the place from which one can look, try to understand without being affected by it – cultivating one’s being “outsiders” – the great decay that is taking place beyond the border: the slide into hatred, war and massacres of entire cities in that neighboring territory that was Yugoslavia.
And it is surprising to think that, although this historical material has been reworked and “fixed” in the fantastic inventions of the “exiled” Aleksandar Hemon, an American of Bosnian origins, in the stories of the Croatian Daša Drndic or Slavenka Drakulic or in Italy by Rosella Postorino, Federica Manzon is almost the only one to fearlessly tackle a very broad span of history, the fifty years from Tito’s twilight in the 1970s to the war in Ukraine. Bringing her protagonists into the Marshal’s rooms.
Who really is Alma’s father? A spy, like those who appear in Javier Marías’ novels? Her daughter doesn’t know, nor do we, and when she asks her grandfather, he replies: «What nonsense. Maybe it was. Everything would be easier.” Is he just the man who writes Tito’s speeches, or rather rewrites them for the archives and newspapers, given that live the Marshal loses the thread and doesn’t close the metaphors? For her there remains the father who took her to the island of Brijuni, with the zebras and Tito dressed in white, who taught her to read facts from details, who told her fantastic stories of gypsies and spoke to her about bratstvo i jedinstvo, brotherhood and unity. He is the man of brief returns and “magnificent moments” who knows how to arouse attachment, like all inconstant and fugitives.
The other man in Alma’s life, who is now 53 years old, is Vili. The boy who came from Belgrade, never at home on the Karst, the first lover – and there will be many lovers, without importance, because the only simple contact is that of bodies – who will discover the Orthodox popes on the Red Bridge and religion. And then, in a quarrel with Alma’s father who will freeze him with a you know nothing (here comes the phrase again, almost a quotation from the famous incipit of Javier Marías: «You should never say anything…”) he will escape to Belgrade, to be “among one’s own people” and defend them. Alma will see him again – starting on the path of journalism – in Belgrade, among the Serbian paramilitaries and then on television: he is the photographer alongside Mladic in Srebrenica.
The ending is John le Carré-style, with a reversal of perspectives that opens up to a vertigo, an abyss of depravity, oppression and violence. And he will reveal to Alma, at least in part, who her father was. Instead, she will be left wondering whether her grandparents were right, for whom memory counts most of all, or her parents – who wanted to escape the bonds of the past and rootedness. If, as you believe, “understanding is more important than love, and secrets too”, perhaps you will accept that in the silences of the people closest to you, even in fictions there was a gift of freedom and protection. From whom, perhaps, she hasn’t had any.
The presentations
The author presents the book in Milan on Tuesday 16 January (6.30 pm, Feltrinelli in Piazza Piemonte, with Giorgio Fontana and Marco Missiroli), Thursday 18 in Trieste (6.30 pm, Lovat bookshop, with Paolo Rumiz), Friday 19 in Udine (at 18, Libreria Moderna Udinese, with Anna Piuzzi), Monday 22nd in Bologna (6pm, Feltrinelli in piazza Ravegnana, with Andrea Tarabbia), Wednesday 24th in Verona (6pm, Feltrinelli in via Quattro Spade, with Riccardo Mauroner), Saturday 27th in Rovereto, in Trentino (7 pm, Arcadia bookshop), Thursday 1 February in Turin (6 pm, Readers’ Club), on the 2nd in Novara (6 pm, Readers’ Club) and on the 3rd in Vimercate, in Brianza (at 17, Il Gabbiano bookshop, with Fabio Deotto).
January 16, 2024 (changed January 16, 2024 | 5:35 pm)
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