TRIESTE by Daša Drndić
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TRIESTE
Daša Drndić Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac Maclehose Press (maclehosepress.com) £20.00 |
BEHIND EVERY NAME THERE IS A STORY
These words, on an otherwise blank page, some 140 pages into Daša Drndić’s Trieste, and the forty-four pages that follow which contain the names of “about 9000 Jews who were deported from Italy or killed in Italy in the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945” form the breath-taking core of this remarkable book. Trieste, Drndić’s first novel to be translated into English, ostensibly tells the story of the elderly Haya Tedeschi as she waits for the son she has not seen in sixty-two years.
Tedeschi, a native of the town of Gorizia, a small town at the eastern extremity of Italy, sits in a rocking chair, sorting through a red basket that contains her entire life. As we spend time with the old lady, we come to learn of Gorizia’s colourful past – its location means that it changed hands several times during Haya’s lifetime – and of the history of her family, a family of Catholicised Jews trying to survive through turbulent times. This history, complete with photographs and document snippets, comes in the form of a disorganised narrative that might be prompted by an old lady taking documents from a basket, glancing through them, then providing her own summary. In some cases, the timeline is clear – the events leading up to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for example, the catalyst for the First World War – while in others, we will see a single character’s story through to death, or that point at which they pass out of Haya’s ken, before jumping back and picking up the main thread where it left off.
As the story progresses, we learn that Haya’s son, stolen from her in 1945, was fathered by an SS officer serving at the San Sabba camp on the outskirts of nearby Trieste. The child was stolen and placed in one of Himmler’s Lebensborn homes, which were set up to maintain the purity of the Aryan race. The child’s father was none other than Kurt Franz, a brutal man who spent time as a sub-commander of the Treblinka camp before being transferred to Trieste and who counted amongst his hobbies a form of target practice that replaced the traditional clay pigeon with live infants hurled into the air by his comrades.
Starting slow, and taking us back to the very start of the Twentieth Century, the story of Haya and her family and the region in which she has spent the vast majority of her life, lulls us into a false sense of security before knocking us off our feet with detailed descriptions of the atrocities committed by Kurt Franz and the other members of Aktion T4 who ended the war in Trieste. Cleverly blurring the line between fact and fiction, Drndić pulls no punches, and leaves the reader slightly shell-shocked by the time the book comes to a close.
Using witness narratives, both real and imagined (‘“How old are you?” “I’m dead.”’), from both victims and perpetrators, as well as brief biographies of the key SS men involved, and a number of other narrative tricks and tics, Drndić builds a story that is all the more shocking for being true. This reader tends to be somewhat jaded after almost thirty years of reading crime and horror fiction, but nothing can prepare you for the sheer onslaught of horror in this catalogue of atrocities.
Two Germans stood there listening to what was going on. At the end they’d say Alles schläft – They’re all asleep. Then we would open the door. The bodies fell out like potatoes. Bloody, covered with urine and shit. People bled from their ears and noses. It was dark inside the chamber. People would jump over one another to catch some air. They’d try to break down the door. The stronger ones would trample the children and the weak. Some people were unrecognisable. There were crushed children’s skulls…
Odd phrasings make for disturbing images, as in this description of the crematorium at San Sabba:
The ovens are inaugurated on 4 April, 1944, with a celebratory test run incinerating seventy bodies of hostages killed at the Villa Opicina shooting range the day before.
Or the matter-of-fact descriptions of the men who ran these camps:
Josef Hirtreiter, S.S.-Scharführer…Low I.Q….Hadamer 1940 (washes dishes); Sobibor and Treblinka 1942-43. Speciality: killing one- and two-year-old children: when transports are being unloaded, grabs children by the legs and smashes them against a freight car.
As the story nears its end, and we meet Haya’s son, we discover that his abduction is far from an isolated incident. As with the experiences of those in the camps, the stories of these young children (now men and women in their sixties and seventies) who have no idea who they are, or where they came from, are told in their own voices (one notable voice here is that of Anni-Frid Lyngstad: “I was a singer in ABBA. The brunette.”).
Through it all, Drndić threads a number of themes: the importance of family, from the family tree of the Tedeschi family, as far back as Haya is able to trace it, through the witness accounts which mention, on more than one occasion, sending loved ones to their death, or shaving the heads or extracting the teeth of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, grandparents before their final trip to the gas chambers, and on to the victims of the Lebensborn program, and the family ties that bind them, ultimately, to men and women who are infamous for being monsters. There is also the notion that what happened in those places was only possible because of the veil of secrecy that surrounded them. Each instance of the word secret, or secrecy, or whatever other variation, appears in the text in italics, emphasising the fact that these were secrets that should have been questioned and exposed much earlier, and a warning for future generations not to make the same mistake. And, of course, the tenet that behind every name there is a story. Drndić tells some of these stories here, as have many others in the past – Tom Keneally, Primo Levi, Chil Rajchman, to name but a few – but there are still more names, and more stories than there is time, or willingness, to tell.
Trieste feels like a very personal book for Drndić, and one can’t help but wonder if this anger is hers, disguised as the anger of a man who has never existed. Where blame is warranted, she points the finger of her avatar, from Arnold Schwarzenegger (seen as an apologist) to the entire Catholic Church. There is also credit where it is due, most notably for the sons of Hans Frank, and the daughter of Amon Göth (famously portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List).
This is a difficult book to read, as horror builds upon horror until the reader feels numb, but it is an important novel, and one that deserves a wide readership. In the end, Trieste is more documentary than fiction. It’s a beautifully-written work (despite the often-horrific subject matter) and appears in a wonderful translation from the ever-reliable Maclehose Press. I certainly won’t claim to have enjoyed the experience, but it’s one I’m glad I had, and one that will stay with me for a long time. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
ANGELMAKER by Nick Harkaway
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ANGELMAKER
Nick Harkaway (www.nickharkaway.com) William Heinemann (www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/imprint/william-heinemann) £12.99 |
Every so often, I run across a book that catches me completely by surprise; a book that I picked up on a whim, having never heard of it before, that strikes a chord and immediately becomes a firm favourite. Nick Harkaway’s first novel, The Gone-Away World, was just such a novel, from its eye-catching hardback cover (the “Signed by the Author” sticker was a sweetener, I’ll happily admit) when I saw it on the shelf at my local Waterstone’s (or is it Waterstones?), to the interesting and intriguing blurb that I found inside, to the sheer delight I encountered when I started to read. Needless to say, I have been waiting with great anticipation for Harkaway’s second novel and I’m happy to say that it has been a worthwhile almost-four-year wait.
Angelmaker tells the story of Joshua Joseph (“Joe”) Spork, a quiet, unassuming man who makes a living repairing clockwork and enjoying the quiet life. Joe has a past that makes this more difficult than it seems, for he is the son of Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, at one time London’s most notorious gangster, and the leader of the legendary Night Market. When Joe’s friend, Billy Friend, turns up on his doorstep with a piece of erotic automata, and a mysterious book and assorted oddments, Joe is intrigued, and contrives to meet the client from whom Billy has obtained the items.
The book, the key to a doomsday device built shortly after the Second World War, invites trouble to Joe’s doorstep, from the Legacy Board – in the guise of Messrs Titwhistle and Cummerbund – to the mysterious, and sinister, Ruskinite monks. Joe soon finds himself the most wanted man in Britain and, with a somewhat motley crew – including a woman slipping towards the end of her eighties who might just be the only person alive who knows exactly what’s going on – he confronts the forces of the mighty Shem Shem Tsien, International Bastard of Mystery, in an attempt to save the world.
With his second novel, Harkaway moves away from the science fiction setting, while retaining all of the wit and verve that made The Gone-Away World such a success. Angelmaker is more in the mold of Neil Gaiman, China Mieville or Christopher Fowler: the novel is set firmly in a modern day London, but there’s also a city beneath; the literal underworld, where the city’s shady characters and forgotten souls spend most of their time. This is the world of the Tosher’s Beat and the Night Market, and represents a world that Joe is trying to forget, although his eventual return seems inevitable from the outset. Angelmaker is an adventure story, a spy thriller, old-fashioned gangster noir and black comedy rolled into one with a hint of satire for good measure.
The characters are beautifully drawn, real people in a world that’s slightly off-kilter: the old woman who was, once upon a time, one of England’s deadliest agents; the fast-talking lawyer with a gift for the dramatic; his sister, with her outrageously sexy toes and her slightly skewed views on equal rights; the evil and cracked Shem Shem Tsien, who wants to become God, but who feels the need to surround himself with bug-zapping lights because of a piece of fiction he once read; the oddly-mismatched Titwhistle and Cummerbund, Angelmaker’s answer to Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar (“hilarious though they are to look upon they are less funny than Typhoid Mary and more serious than the whole of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs”). And holding everything together the easy-going Joe, a man starting to feel old:
Even now – particularly now, when thirty years of age is visible in his rear view mirror and forty glowers at him from down the road ahead, now that his skin heals a little more slowly than it used to from solder burns and nicks and pinks, and his stomach is less a washboard and more a comfy if solid bench – Joe avoids looking at it.
Joe is quite typical for the hero of this type of novel: slightly disconnected from the world, more interested in the clockwork with which he spends his days than the people around him and, as a result, less attuned to subtext, even when it’s thrust in his face (quite literally):
Joe gives her his hand, and she places his hand, palm down, on her chest and leans firmly towards him…With the heel of his hand Joe can feel the curve of one breast. He has absolutely no idea whether this is deliberate. It’s lovely. He tries to be polite and not notice.
As you might expect from a man as opinionated as Harkaway (go on, check his Twitter feed, you’ll see what I mean), his jokes are timely and extremely cutting. One example of many: as the bees, harbingers of the end of the world, spread across the globe, governments act, moving quickly into the realms of the ridiculous overreaction:
Bee-keepers are told they must register, must submit their hives for inspection. No, of course, these are no ordinary bees, but it pays to be safe. It helps to rule people out. Any bee-keeper, after all, might be a sympathiser, a fifth columnist.
What Angelmaker most resembles, to my mind, is a vast and sprawling Neal Stephenson novel, the perfect companion piece for his Cryptonomicon. It takes a similar form: the two time streams, one present day (or as near as damn it), the other Edie’s story of her time as a much younger woman working for Science 2. Where Stephenson spends chunks of the book describing the technology and the cryptographic techniques, Harkaway finds himself with a much less solid proposition, cleverly avoiding any in-depth detail as to how the book, the bees, the attendant clockwork actually work. But for everything else, he is a fiend for detail and it is refreshing to find an author unafraid to follow the tangent, even if it is at the temporary cost of dramatic tension. And go back to what I said about Joe and typical heroes in this type of novel; tell me Randy Waterhouse doesn’t fit this exact mold.
Angelmaker is that rare beast: the sophomore novel that lives up to – if not surpasses – the promise of the author’s first. It’s a wonderfully-written book – Harkaway has a knack with the language that makes this huge novel very easy to read and enjoy. It has more than its fair share of dark and shocking scenes and more than a handful of genuine laugh-out-loud moments, and even one or two places where both things are true at the same time. It’s clear to see the novel’s influences, but this is something new, something different and completely unexpected. It’s goes in a much different direction than The Gone-Away World (although there are connections enough for the sharp-eyed reader), which might disappoint a small contingent looking for more of the same, but it does achieve a similar end: it’s a beautiful showcase for a talented writer, a unique voice and inventive mind who can, it seems, turn his hand to anything.
At this early stage, I’m more than happy to call Angelmaker one of the best books you’re likely to read this year. We can live in hope that the wait for the next one won’t be quite as long.
