Cary, Joseph's A Ghost in Trieste 1st (first) edition by Cary, Joseph published by University Of Chicago Press [Hardcover]

by Joseph Cary

Gem of the Adriatic, Trieste sparkled and beckoned through the pages of poets and novelists. Drawn there in search of literary ghosts, of the poet Umberto Saba and the novelists Italo Svevo and James Joyce, Joseph Cary found instead a city with an imaginative life of its own, the one that rises, tantalizing from the pages of this book. The story of Cary's travels, A Ghost in Trieste, is also a tale of discovery and transformation, as the bustling world of port and airplane, baggage and trams and trains becomes the landscape of history and literature, language and art, psychoanalysis and the self.Here is the crossroads of East and West. A port held in turn by the Romans, the Venetians, the Austrians, the Germans, the Slavs, and finally the Italians, Trieste is the capital of nowhere, fertile source of a unique literary florescence before the First World War. At times an exile home and an exiled city. "I cannot claim to have walked across it all,:" wrote Saba, the poet of Trieste in 1910 of the city Cary crosses and recrosses, seeking the poetry of the place that inspired its literary giants. Trieste's cultural and historical riches, its geographical splendor of hills and sea and mysterious presence unfold in a series of stories, monologues and literary juxtapositions that reveal the city's charms as well as its seductive hold on the writer's imagination. Throughout, literary and immediate impressions alike are elaborated in paintings and maps, and in handsome line drawings by Nicholas Read.This "clownish and adolescent Parsifal," this Trieste of the "prickly grace," this place "impaled in my heart like a permanent point," this symbol of the Adriatic, this "city made of books" — here the book remakes the city. The Trieste of allusions magically becomes a city of palpable allure, of warmth and trying contradictions and gritty beauty. Part travel diary, part guide book, part literary history, A Ghost in Trieste is a brilliant introduction to an extraordinary time and place. In Joseph Cary, Trieste has found a new poet, and readers, a remarkably captivating companion and guide.

Unknown Binding

First published November 15, 1993

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tripping the Light Ephemeral

You know celadon ? It's a special kind of Korean ceramic ranging in color from apple green to white, through all stages of pastel green and beige. Old pieces are rare and valuable, the target of certain collectors. Celadon pottery comes in various shapes--plates, jars, bottles, etc---and is always delicate. You could become a big collector, gather in a few dozen specimens, but, let me ask you, would you then be an expert on Korea ? No, you'd just have a nice collection of green pottery. Well, if you read Cary's book on Trieste, you'll page through his series of literary images and reminiscences about times he never knew, a place he spent a total of three weeks in, seemingly speaking to no one. You'll wind up with some delicate images, some lines of poetry, some interesting little biographies of various Trieste notables, and a bit of amateurish history. A celadon collection for sure. I admit the book is sensitively-written, sentimental, and "cultured" (whatever that may mean to you) but if you like books with a bit of focus, well, you might be disappointed here. Not a single living Triestine mars the pages full of pressed flowers. Nobody eats oysters or blows their nose. Some pale grappa once, on a single page.

Cary wanders the streets thinking about three literary figures that didn't really have that much to do with one another, but whom he hoped to draw together in some literary tour-de-force---the novelist Italo Svevo, the poet Umberto Saba, and James Joyce, who taught English in Trieste for many years. Cary curls around the city like a very thin vine, clinging, touching and re-touching the same theme and subjects, calling the world he thus creates "ghostly". Here we are in the park, here we take a tram ride, we buy some old books, talk about some long-lost cultural figures and a bit about the economic boom that brought Trieste to prosperity before WW I. Italy yearned to unite with its Austrian-occupied little brother. It did at last, at an enormous cost unmentioned by Cary. No doubt our work is most ephemeral, light, fleeting. He gives up finally, realizing that his project is not feasible. If the Japanese art of ukiyo-e refers to pictures of a "floating world", Cary's book is `ukiyo-lite". He himself concludes: "There was no actual literary Trieste. It was dead and gone. It was merely myself, poor ghost, who was literary." Pathetic admission. So maybe you'll like this if your taste runs to semi-literary meanderings (well-penned, I stress), accompanied by some twee line drawings and a few photos, but a more indefinite, vague, and ghostly book would be hard to imagine. If that was the author's intention, then he succeeded magnificently. I have not read any other books like this, and I can't say that I wish to do so in future.

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, especially after the first pages, in which the author explains that he set out to write a scholarly project about the interactions of the three great early twentieth-century writers associated with Trieste, James Joyce, Umberto Saba, and Italo Svevo, only to discover that there really were not that many interactions.

Instead of a scholarly treatise, he wrote a kind of cultural history of Trieste, in a light tone without any footnotes. Nicholas Read draws some little diagrams, makes some squiggly lines between things, and Cary throws in a section of translations of Saba, Scipio Slataper, Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo), and Joyce poems penned in Triestine dialect, as well as translations of these from the Italian of Montale.

It's a lot of fun, as long as one doesn't expect it to be either exhaustive or especially authoritative. Cary sometimes seems to want to claim things about the city after, say, 1975 or so, but he doesn't seem to know much about it. He also doesn't have any particular insight into the Slavic aspects of the city, which are considerable, but hidden from people who come here with just Italian, or with Italian and German.

Still there's plenty of cleverness, and the book holds together sloppily. That, I suspect, is part of its charm.

[Dale Pobega · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few interesting insights here and there about Trieste ...but really, a book researched and written on the basis of a three week stay!?