Sun, Dec 30, 2001 page19

• `Trieste and the meaning of nowhere'

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  Trieste is immensely fortunate to have Jan Morris write a book about it. At 35, she wrote a famous book about Venice. Now its near neighbor is honored to receive her perceptive and eminently stylish attention.

  Historically, Trieste was Vienna's outlet to the sea, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it flourished as the only port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When that empire collapsed in 1918, Trieste went into decline. After World War II, no one even knew which country it should belong to. And when Italy finally won it in 1953, Trieste became a real backwater, a port tucked away in a corner and geographically of little use to its new masters.

  But now that the states of Eastern Europe are standing in line to join the EU, Trieste finds itself poised to become their quick access to the Suez Canal, and once again a gateway to the sea routes to Asia.

  This book is like a congenial conversation with Jan Morris herself, perhaps at a coffeehouse on the central piazza. As Vienna's port, Trieste boasted the best coffee in the world, supplying as it did the world's pre-eminent coffee-drinking city. "I prefer to hang out at the Flora," she writes, and goes on to describe its typical clientele. Only later does she inform you that this particular establishment is in fact no more, and what she has been describing is a scene from a hundred years ago, when Trieste was in its prime. This coy, shrewd, winning mix of the past and present, as well as of the historical and personal, is highly typical of this exceptionally delightful book.

  Its style is similar to that of a late Mozart string quartet, one of the group written for the King of Prussia -- wistful, even sad, but nevertheless buoyed by high spirits and energetic playfulness, almost in spite of itself.

  Jan Morris is not interested in the tourism based on pious nostalgia currently being promoted in Trieste. Instead, she looks at the compromises and uncertainties that typified the place even in its greatest years, its contradictions and its fallibilities. She is far more at home with great naval vessels, their tonnage almost invariably recorded, than she is with theme parks, and prefers elusive flavors and nebulous regret (both her phrases) to the modern and energetic, though she bravely gives the latter its due.

  She views the famous names who lived, however briefly, in Trieste as picturesque cameos. Joyce, Freud, Italo Svevo, Einstein -- they all appear, only to mix with the colorful and polyglot inhabitants, Serbs, Italians, Austrians, and many more.

  It's not one of the world's great cities, she writes, but it is in many ways the one she finds most congenial to her own nature. It stands, she says, for the people round the world who she likes and admires the most.

  Reading this book about Trieste kept reminding me of Taipei. Both are cities which are reasonably prosperous, of moderate size, less than world.-famous, and that attract relatively few outsiders. Both have, as a result, retained qualities of decency, honesty, innocence and friendliness on almost every hand. They are choice destinations reserved for the most discerning.

  Nor is this the only Taiwan connection. Trieste's famous shipping line, Lloyd Triestino, today has Taiwanese owners, and container vessels still depart from Trieste for Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and, presumably most important of all, Kaohsiung.

  So what is this "meaning of nowhere" in Morris' title? It refers to her very characteristic view that everything we do in life is written on water. All will be forgotten, and the things we do are no more than this -- roles we inhabit, attitudes we strike, in the short span between birth and death ("the ultimate bookends").

  This is what leads her to describe even battles, usually seen by moralists and radicals as hideously cruel aberrations, as picturesque gestures. Some things, it's true, are too terrible to fit into this pattern, and then she turns her look away. The systematic murder of Jews in Trieste in 1943 is just too awful for her to contemplate at length, so in her walks round the city the simply avoids the site concerned.

  Her "nowhere," then, is really the place we all inhabit, that piquant, lovable, constantly disappearing scene of life's passing show. She loves parades, just as she loves fleets dressed out in their flags (she has written an entire book about one charismatic English admiral), because they are displays of magnificence that briefly defy transience, that flourish in the face of inevitable dissolution. She can be guaranteed to have a soft spot for shows of panache of any and every sort.

  In the final analysis, it's self-deception, Morris writes, that sees us through. But it's a self-deception she entirely approves of, and is a master at showing us how to carry off.

  This is why it is so distressing to read her saying that this will be her last book. She has taught us to see the world her way, and now proposes to disappear from the literary scene like the very phantoms she has so often evoked. Most readers will be filled with a great sadness at the thought. Why, we cry, cannot we have more? Seventy-five is no great age these days. Verdi wrote Falstaff, perhaps his greatest opera, at 80, after all. Come back, Jan! You gave us such charm, taught us to see things so undogmatically, with such infinite tolerance. Don't go! Don't leave us alone in the cold.

  Wales, she writes, is her home, and the place she increasingly misses when traveling. So perhaps, instead of books, there will be something else -- an epic poem in Welsh, or a filmed round-Wales trip by balloon. Both would be very characteristic, and either, needless to say, nectar to her innumerable fans, most of whom will buy this book without a second thought.

  For your information

  Publication Notes"

  Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere By Jan Morris 195 pages Faber And Faber
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