A City in Search of an Author: The Literary Identity of Trieste by Katia Pizzi (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.1, 2004 223 Catholic culture remain unexplored. This is a pity since the work of a highly popular writer such as Susanna Tamaro (complete with her editorials for Famiglia cristiana) would have provided an interesting case study of a Catholic form of impegno. In the finalpages Burns attacks the absence of a critical community capable ofunderstanding the important contribution of this latest generation of Italian writers. The 'critical snobbery' among Italian intellectuals who insist on a distinction between high and low culture is self-confidently deemed to be at the root ofthe problem (p. 185). In conclusion, this book provides a sophisticated and stimulating insight into the world of contemporary Italian literature. It is packed with thought-provoking considerations and is very successful in assessing the complex net of relations between literature and its political and social context. Burns's views are presented with such vigour and scholarly panache that Fragments of 'impegno' will be an excellent starting point for many discussions to come. Pembroke College, Oxford Guido Bonsaver A City in Search of an Author: The Literary Identity of Trieste. By Katia Pizzi. London and New York: Sheffield Academic Press. 2001. 218 pp. ?60; $98.95. ISBN 1-84127-284-1. In this handsomely produced volume Katia Pizzi lays out a map of the twentiethcentury history of the ltalian literature of Trieste and its immediate hinterland, the Carso (or Karst) plateau and the Istrian peninsula. The author's ambitious sweep is reflected in her undivided bibliography of some six hundred items covering Triestine history, society, culture, and literature and some broader fields, and is supported by two maps and a fifteen-page chronology. Triestinitd represents a remarkably crowded and challenging field for literary history, rivalling, and suggesting comparisons with, napoletanita and sicilianita, and stemming from an even more contorted history than these latter. For the inextricable ethnic mixture of the Triestine area, in keeping with much of the Balkans, represents a classic casualty of the era of nationalism predicated on territorially rooted language differences articulated through the power relays ofmodern state bureaucracies and print capitalism. Italians and Slavs in the area made symmetrically opposite claims based on predominantly ltalian urban centres in predominantly Slav rural areas, with the respective population count always fiercely contested but roughly balanced: does the hinterland belong to the city or the city to the hinterland? The Triestine territorywas twice traumatized. After the First World War and under Fascism the firstsolution was implacably imposed. The second was ferociously attempted after the Second World War. Battle lines have still not been fully dismantled, but European unification holds the promise of superseding the bitter national struggles of the twentieth century. Pizzi offersa literary perspective on this traumatic history,starting with the Triestine myths or constructs of italianita and an associated but distinct triestinitd,germinating among the Vociani before the Great War and burgeoning after it and through and beyond the Second World War, linked to the quasi-religious mystique of irredentismo. She adopts the analysis propounded by Claudio Magris in the seminal volume co-authored with Angelo Ara, Trieste: un'identitd di frontiera (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), of an endogamous literature feeding on itselfwithin a tightly knit group of writers, Giani Stuparich central among them. She delves deep and wide in this terrain, exploring first how male writers from Saba to Stelio Mattioni variously construct the topography of Trieste in terms of an absorbing maternal womb or female vulva, and of a human female presence or absence. This female imagery is extended in the second of the book's four chapters to the fluid or invisible border between the closed urban space and the open spaces 224 Reviews around it,and between Italians and Slavs, climaxing in the horrifictrauma ofthe mass murder of captives being hurled into thefoibe?deep crevasses in the Karstic plateau. Pizzi picks up the suggestion of viewing the foiba as the Bakhtinian chronotope characterizing the regional literature of this period, but, without saying so, she has in effectapplied Bakhtin's notion more persuasively to the topography of the whole area (and might have interestingly discussed the same in relation to Hillis Miller's notion of the atopical?a literary locality which stands...