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The Celestial City

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
Englisch
Dedalus Europeerschienen am09.02.2024
A young man plunges into student life, in flight from an overbearing father, in search of an identity of his own making. He is like everyone else in his quest for a future he cannot yet understand. His experiences, often comic, always innocently human, are an exploration of the concept of boundaries. But in choosing to study in Trieste, a city of many-layered histories and ethnicities, a city of brilliant sunshine and ferocious gales, he finds that life, and love, throw him more questions than answers. It is a tale of Everyman, but more than that: in the hands of Diego Marani, author of the celebrated New Finnish Grammar, this wry and affecting novel leads the reader on a nostalgic and thought-provoking journey made wholly individual by its evocation of place - the celestial city of Trieste. 'I did not think that one could weep for a city. But at that time I did not know that cities are women, one can fall in love with them and never forget them.'

Diego Marani was born in Tresigallo, a village near Ferrara in 1959. He studied at the university of Trieste and has been working in Brussels for the European Union as the officer in charge of Cultural Diplomacy until 2021. He has been director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris until April 2023. He writes columns for various European newspapers about current affairs in Europanto, a language that he has invented. His collection of short stories in Europanto, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot has been published by Dedalus. In Italian he has published 12 books, including the highly acclaimed trilogy New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus 2011), The Last of the Vostyachs (Dedalus 2012) and The Interpreter (Dedalus 2016) which have found worldwide success. God's Dog, a very different detective novel was published by Dedalus in 2014. His latest novel The Celestial City was published by Dedalus in 2024.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextA young man plunges into student life, in flight from an overbearing father, in search of an identity of his own making. He is like everyone else in his quest for a future he cannot yet understand. His experiences, often comic, always innocently human, are an exploration of the concept of boundaries. But in choosing to study in Trieste, a city of many-layered histories and ethnicities, a city of brilliant sunshine and ferocious gales, he finds that life, and love, throw him more questions than answers. It is a tale of Everyman, but more than that: in the hands of Diego Marani, author of the celebrated New Finnish Grammar, this wry and affecting novel leads the reader on a nostalgic and thought-provoking journey made wholly individual by its evocation of place - the celestial city of Trieste. 'I did not think that one could weep for a city. But at that time I did not know that cities are women, one can fall in love with them and never forget them.'

Diego Marani was born in Tresigallo, a village near Ferrara in 1959. He studied at the university of Trieste and has been working in Brussels for the European Union as the officer in charge of Cultural Diplomacy until 2021. He has been director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris until April 2023. He writes columns for various European newspapers about current affairs in Europanto, a language that he has invented. His collection of short stories in Europanto, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot has been published by Dedalus. In Italian he has published 12 books, including the highly acclaimed trilogy New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus 2011), The Last of the Vostyachs (Dedalus 2012) and The Interpreter (Dedalus 2016) which have found worldwide success. God's Dog, a very different detective novel was published by Dedalus in 2014. His latest novel The Celestial City was published by Dedalus in 2024.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781915568533
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum09.02.2024
ReiheDedalus Europe
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse484 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.15168464
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

I arrived in Trieste for the first time one brilliant morning in October. After a long journey through the dull and misty plains, the train had suddenly emerged from the fog and below us had appeared the sea. It gleamed, motionless, criss-crossed in the distance by the smoky outlines of a few ships. The overhanging cliff of the railway cutting turned red under a covering of autumnal foliage, which spread in thick woods as soon as the rocky crags opened up to reveal the plateau. In the narrower parts, the train whistled to announce itself and the rattling of the carriages grew in intensity. The limpid sky lent the countryside sharper contours and from one curve to the next an ever-changing prospect of the approaching city presented itself to us. The only person still in the compartment besides myself was an elderly gentleman of anxious countenance who had spent the whole stretch from the station at Mestre, where he had boarded, looking impatiently out of the window. He was wearing a crumpled suit of old-fashioned cut, grey, like the broad-lapelled overcoat which he had never removed. When the first houses began to slide past the windows, he hauled his large suitcase from the rack and made his way towards the exit. I followed him, swinging my rucksack on to my shoulder. Only then did I notice that he was weeping. He occasionally hid his face, but he could not prevent himself from staring out at the city that was opening out below us, street by street. His eyes glistened with emotion as they took in the scene. Soon the other passengers waiting to alight noticed it as well, and they all looked away. The sight of a man weeping is disturbing. It does not elicit compassion, as do the tears of a woman or a child. It seems an indulgence, a weakness. Rather than console him, one wants to punish him.

I haven´t been back for thirty years! Thirty years since I saw my beloved Trieste...´ he murmured in a broken voice, wringing and rubbing his hands. They were the calloused and scarred hands, the stubby fingers of a working man. Stepping down on to the platform, he plunged into the station crowds, leaving a trail of sadness in the joyous light of this arrival, which was for me, on the contrary, akin to a landfall, a dizzying new start. That scene remained impressed on my memory and still today, after so much time, I recall it with a shudder. That man´s eyes spoke of the terrible cruelty of fate, the regret for a life already spent, of which this morning sunshine was the final glimmer. I did not think that one could weep for a city. But at that time I did not know that cities are women, and one can fall in love with them too and never forget them.

I arrived in Trieste drunk on schoolboy irredentism, learnt from school books in the radiant days of May which had preceded my final exams, and excited by a school trip to Redipuglia and an infatuation with D´Annunzio. To deepen my knowledge, I had spent time with Saba´s Canzoniere and Svevo´s La coscienza di Zeno, then a biography of Franz Joseph, which I had hardly begun to read, three of papa´s books, dated and signed in pencil on the title page, as he liked to do. But of the real Trieste and its tragedies I knew nothing. My high-school history book stopped at 25th April 1945, with a photograph of the Hiroshima bomb on the last page. Thus, alighting among the dark palazzi and the fatal shores, in the red light of that late autumn, I felt that I had come to add my own contribution, by my patriotic presence, to the restoration of the heroic city to the motherland. The first contact promptly confused me. I had asked a passer-by the way to the university.

Ciò mulo, te son taliàn? Te ga de ciòr la coriera in via del Coroneo!´ the man answered brusquely. And it was that question, asking me if I was Italian, which surprised me. Wasn´t he Italian himself, then? Weren´t we in the redeemed´ territories, won with so much sacrifice of blood from the Austrians? And why answer me in dialect if he had sensed I came from somewhere else? And then - although I understood I had to take the bus at via del Coroneo - why that appellation, that mulo´, that ass´, which struck me in that moment as offensive? I was not yet acquainted with the character of this city, as peevish as an old woman whom age has turned irritable, nor the resentment in which it lived its enclosed life, wanting recompense and vengeance for the evils it has suffered, for the outrage of a betrayal about which I as yet knew nothing. And indeed it seemed to be populated entirely by old people. They swarmed the streets, hopping on buses like locusts, scornful, sulky, spiteful. They grabbed for the door handles, planted themselves on the seats, pushing aside anyone in their way and especially young people like us. They hated us, they never missed an opportunity to annoy us, to bully us, as if we were a scourge which had fallen on them and against which they had to defend themselves with all their strength. This was a vigorous and tenacious flock of elders; in no way were they frail little old souls in need of assistance to cross the road; a different race of old people entirely, who seemed to become more robust the more they aged until they progressed so far into time that God forgot to strike them down. Old age in Trieste seemed to be contagious, an epidemic which spread unstoppably through the city, covering with wrinkles anyone who arrived, infecting them with an instant fever of regret and resentment.

I was struck by the bursts of military music ringing out through the streets and squares, where suddenly a march would be heard and a company of veterans in tattered old uniforms would troop by, nostalgically remembering even their defeats, provided they were safely in the past. This was the thing: Trieste seemed to worship the past, whatever it might have been. An undefined time whose breath, in the snapping of the flags in the wind, could still be felt; and the whole city would then strain its ears to capture every note and wallow in longing for that past. The present, all the more alive and slippery in comparison, impetuous, precipitous, produced in the city an impulse to reject it from which ensued also the recognition that all things pass and only in passing become definite, if not acceptable, comprehensible.

In my city on the plains everything even remotely military lay hidden and unseen by the population. A decaying barracks with peeling plaster and brushwood climbing the fencing on which was hung the pretentious yellow notice declaring no entry beyond a boundary made of collapsing wire netting and rusty barbed wire. The few flags raised above the modest buildings drooped on their pennants, heavy with humidity and discoloured by the summer heat. If anything, they were an incitement to retreat, to desertion. Meanwhile, all around, an unrestrainable present hummed and swarmed, impatient, curious, swelling like a summer storm and drawing everything towards entirely different expectations. A sense of time constantly renewing itself brushed aside a shapeless and unravelling past that was remembered solely to be avoided, whatever it had been.

Which is to say that it was a city from which I was in flight. A spirit of restlessness had driven me to steer clear of studies that could be burdened by my father´s supervision, which meant risking a move far from home. Papa had scrutinised with some puzzlement the certificate which confirmed my successful hurdling of the exam for admission to the School of Translating and Interpreting, which had just that year become a university faculty. He was searching it for evidence of fraud or deceit. He found none and had to give his consent. I freed myself from a city lacking the ennoblement of any marble, always dirty and muddy, which bore the traces of papa in every corner, his memories, his activities. A city which I always saw as divided in two, light and shade, with which I could find no way to align myself. I was not enraptured by its noisy outpourings, its enthusiasms, its ideological cavalcades whose dust took days and days to settle and veiled everything in falsehood. A city that I felt to be lapped by waves of tedium like a high tide, constantly sparing it but infiltrating it a little more each time, so suitable for papa and to me instead so hostile, a stage on which I could only come to be like him, as I had always done in any case, with great tenacity: not at all out of ambition to take his place, even though that would have been a bold claim, no, but driven merely by the cowardly hope that people might sometimes confuse me with him. I was eager to imitate him or presumably I felt that there was no other way open to me. Of what I had been, up to then, nothing was my own. Every choice I made was his choice, or made in order to fulfil his wishes, not in any way because papa exercised some form of imposition on me but because it was I, the better to resemble him, to have his good will, who conformed to his wishes, which, without the need of any formal expression on his part, emanated from him like an irresistible aura. To leave for Trieste was my gesture of insubordination, my act of desertion. And papa never forgave me for it. He never understood what studies I had followed, and later, what work I did. He never wanted to know. Perhaps he never abandoned the hope that he could draw me back to him and make me a copy of himself, obliterating my identity. Or perhaps he was not even conscious of such things, and if he was trying to cast his shadow over me it was to protect me better from the world´s traps and snares, from my pretensions to be able to manage without him. But deep down not even my act of flight was enough to take possession of my own...
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Autor

Diego Marani was born in Tresigallo, a village near Ferrara in 1959. He studied at the university of Trieste and has been working in Brussels for the European Union as the officer in charge of Cultural Diplomacy until 2021. He has been director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris until April 2023.He writes columns for various European newspapers about current affairs in Europanto, a language that he has invented. His collection of short stories in Europanto, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot has been published by Dedalus.In Italian he has published 12 books, including the highly acclaimed trilogy New Finnish Grammar (Dedalus 2011), The Last of the Vostyachs (Dedalus 2012) and The Interpreter (Dedalus 2016) which have found worldwide success. God's Dog, a very different detective novel was published by Dedalus in 2014. His latest novel The Celestial City was published by Dedalus in 2024.