When I read a book, I absolutely read it from start to finish—meaning from all the words on the cover (front and back), to the title page, the copyright page, and any pages of review blurbs that might be included before the book really starts.

When I read through the blurbs for Trieste at the front of the book, I wondered if I might be getting myself into another Prophet Song situation. Take this from A.N. Wilson writing in the Financial Times: “…although you think that you must have read the worst of the story, there is yet more horror to come … It contains no consolation, no happy resolutions, no hope. … You feel yourself going mad as you read it.”

Well, Prophet Song continues to hold the title for probably the most distressing novel I’ve ever read, but Trieste is no joke either. It’s a work of “documentary fiction” as opposed to a novel in the strictest sense, meaning that it blends fact and fiction in a downright dizzying way—perhaps all the more dizzying to me because I’m very well acquainted with the history covered here: World War II and the Holocaust. I’ve read many of the documentary sources that Drndić consulted for the book. I do freelance work for the Arolsen Archives, an organization that plays a substantial role in the narrative here. I’ve seen Niklas Frank (whose story pops up at the very end of the book) speak in person (alongside Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in a remarkable talk at Sussex University for Holocaust Memorial Day in 2018). I spend many of my working days knee-deep in the horrors of the Holocaust, and while they never become less horrific, they do become ever more familiar, meaning that I sometimes find myself reading litanies of atrocities and almost casually thinking “Yeah, I’ve heard of that, yeah, I knew they did that, yeah…”

This is also maybe why Trieste was, for me, not as deeply upsetting as Prophet Song: because its horrors are familiar and “contained” in a way—contained in a known past—whereas Prophet Song kept presenting fresh horrors with unknown outcomes. That said, I absolutely skipped over some passages in Trieste because I would start reading them and think, “No, I don’t want these images in my head”. To say that Trieste didn’t upset me the way Prophet Song did is really not saying much, because Trieste is frankly horrifying.

It is an account of a woman of Jewish descent who has a relationship with an SS officer and gives birth to his son; the son is abducted from her during the war, and she spends the rest of her life searching for him. But this story is just scaffolding for a much vaster account of Europe under Nazi rule and a reflection on how trauma and atrocity echo down through generations—for the victims and perpetrators alike.

The work of W. G. Sebald is frequently mentioned in connection with Trieste, and for good reason: the entanglement of fact and fiction, the grainy black-and-photos scattered throughout the book, the way you’re continually brought up short by something awful you weren’t expecting, the lack of any tidy conclusion or redemption—it all reminded me of The Rings of Saturn in the best possible way.

Trieste is audacious. In addition to the photos there are typographical quirks, a mixture of languages, occasional footnotes, snippets of songs and poems, excerpts from real interviews, imagined conversations with Holocaust victims (“What is your name? … Ya’akov Wiernik … When were you deported to Treblinka? … 23 August, 1942. … How long did you stay at Treblinka? … Until 2 August, 1943. … How old are you? … I’m dead”), numerous pages featuring short biographies of SS men—and, most remarkably, 43(!) pages of names in tiny type arranged in four columns on each page: “The names of about 9,000 Jews who were deported from Italy, or killed in Italy or in the countries Italy occupied between 1943 and 1945.” This comes at the very start of a chapter entitled “Behind every name there is a story”. So you leaf past the names—because it’s 43(!) pages of names and nothing else, and you want to get back to the narrative of the woman whose child has just been abducted five pages earlier—and as you do so, you think about the title of the chapter and how you are disregarding the story (and thus the entire life) behind each name, and then you think: I see what you did there, Daša Drndić. Well played. Even as a reader, I’m complicit.

This an extraordinary book in every sense of the word, and the translator from the Croatian—Ellen Elias-Bursać—has done a stunning job of rendering a very, very difficult text into (mostly) English (mostly) prose in a way that captures all the beauty and all the horror in equal measure; her work here is a real tour de force. It’s a challenging book in terms of both subject matter and style, it’s relentless, and it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea (I’m probably THE target audience, but I’m weird like that). It really does make you “feel yourself going mad as you read it”, as A.N. Wilson wrote—but as Wilson also wrote at the end of his review: “It is a masterpiece.”

For some interesting insights into the author and this book, I recommend this Granta essay.

Further reading…