Il romanzo — The Novel

Trieste: one city, three countries

The novel's first joke — a girl who lives in three countries without ever moving house — is simply the history of Trieste. Born in 1914, Nella would have been born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose main seaport Trieste had been for more than five centuries. After the First World War the city passed to Italy. After the Second, it was occupied first by Yugoslav forces for some forty days in 1945 and then by the Allies, and from 1947 it was the center of the Free Territory of Trieste, divided into two zones. In 1954 the city returned to Italian administration, and the border with Yugoslavia — today Slovenia — was finally settled in 1975, the year the novel ends. That history made Trieste a city of several languages: Italian, the local dialect triestino (a Venetian-based dialect), Slovene, and for a long time German. The Karst, il Carso, the limestone plateau that rises behind the city, was and is home to Slovene-speaking villages, and a love story between an Italian-speaking boy from the city and a Slovene girl from the Karst would have carried real weight in the 1930s, when fascist Italy pursued a policy of forced Italianization against the Slovene minority. Family sagas that follow one house through the twentieth century are a well-loved genre in Italian fiction, and Trieste has its own literature of memory and borders. Alex's reaction — reading it aloud at four in the morning to hear how it works — is how translators read: not only for what a book says, but for the rhythm it says it in.