Take a photo of a barcode or cover
For sixty-two years she has been waiting.
She sits rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of an Austro Hungarian building in the old Gloriza .The rocking chair is old and, as she rocks, it whimpers.
[...]
Foul breath fills the room (whose? whose?) fills the room, rising to a raging torrent and she knows she must arrange the pebbles around her grave stone, now, just in case, in case he doesn’t come, in case he does, after she has been expecting him for sixty-two years.
This is the 4th of Daša Drndić's 5 novels available in English translation (5 of her last 6 published in Croatian) which I have read, and as well as an excellent book in its own right, what is striking is how well the novels blend together, including intertextual elements, to form one overall impressive and powerful work.
Trieste, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać from the original Sonnenschein, opens in 2006 with the 83 year-old Haya Tedeschi waiting in her room in the town of Gorizia (in the area of Trieste) on the Italian-Slovenian border - waiting for the son who was snatched from her, as a baby, in 1944.
The book has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, and I have reviewed Drndić's other translated novels extensively (see below), but I will just focus here on how she so cleverly combines archival fact with fictional characters and intertextual references to produce something unique.
Haya Tedeschi's early life and her family history, in the first third of the novel, set in the turbulent first decades of the 20th Century, are based (with permission) of the real-life Fulvia Schiff - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trieste-True-Story-Frank-Gent-ebook/dp/B007MEWA7S.
But Fulvia Schiff married an allied soldier and settled in the UK, whereas Drndić has Haya instead meet a German soldier and become pregnant with his child:
A thirty year old German in a uniform comes into her tobacco shop. Oh, he is handsome as a doll. The German already has the polish nickname Lalka, but at this point, when she first sees the dashing German, Haya knows nothing of that, the dashing german tells her later, I am no Lalka, you are my Lalka.
This German soldier is based on (without permission) and indeed essentially is the real-life SS officer Kurt Franz (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Franz), who rose from a cook at the Sonnerstein euthansia camp to commandant at Treblinka. His nickname Lalka - baby face - wholly inappropriate for his sadistic behaviour (http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/berliner.html) - in 1965 he was found guilty of collective murder of at least 300,000 people, and 35 counts of murder involving at least 139 people. The real-life Franz did spend time in the area of Trieste and Gorizia after the Treblinka camp was dismantled although is not known to have fathered a child with a local.
In the novel, Franz abandons his pregnant, Jewish, lover, but when she gives birth her child is snatched. She 62 years later, as the novel opens, finds that the boy was taken into the Lebensborn program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn) and eventually placed with a German foster family.
Drndić has this boy be the photographer who accompanied the real-life journalist Niklas Frank when he interviewed in 1982 the author Drndić has acknowledged as her most important influence, the great Thomas Bernhard (https://www.thomasbernhard.org/interviews/1982intnf.shtml for translated extracts from the real-life interview)
This interview took place in Gmunden where Thomas Bernhard lived in his renovated farmhouse, close to Schloss Oberweis (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Oberweis) which, during the war, was renamed Alpenland - the base of the Lebensborn organisation.
And the real-life Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Frank) himself was to realise over time that his beloved father Hans Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Frank) who died when he was 7, was actually a Nazi war criminal, executed at Nuremburg.
In this novel, The son's adoptive parents are also closely acquainted with Isabella Fischer from the twin novellas Doppelgänger (published earlier than Trieste in the original Croatian), having acquired some of her confiscated property, and indeed they are the people who send her the chocolates she receives each year in the earlier book.
And Haya herself reappears in the later novel Belladonna, where Andreas Ban reads this novel, meets Haya Tedeschi, and later meets the English translator Ellen Elias-Bursać.
Stunning. 4.5 stars.
Bibliography.
Daša Drndić's last 6 works of fiction were:
Doppelgänger (2002), translated into English as Doppelgänger ( 2018) by Celia Hawkesworth and SD Curtis
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2673417580
Shortlisted for 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Leica Format (2003), translated into English as Leica Format (2015) by Celia Hawkesworth
Sonnenschein (2007), translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Shortlisted for 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
April u Berlinu (2009), as yet untranslated
Belladonna (2012), translated into English as Belladonna 2017, by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2338018537
Winner 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 EBRD Literature Prize and 2018 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize
E.E.G (2016), translated into English as E.E.G. (2018), by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2689942293
She sits rocks by a tall window in a room on the third floor of an Austro Hungarian building in the old Gloriza .The rocking chair is old and, as she rocks, it whimpers.
[...]
Foul breath fills the room (whose? whose?) fills the room, rising to a raging torrent and she knows she must arrange the pebbles around her grave stone, now, just in case, in case he doesn’t come, in case he does, after she has been expecting him for sixty-two years.
This is the 4th of Daša Drndić's 5 novels available in English translation (5 of her last 6 published in Croatian) which I have read, and as well as an excellent book in its own right, what is striking is how well the novels blend together, including intertextual elements, to form one overall impressive and powerful work.
Trieste, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać from the original Sonnenschein, opens in 2006 with the 83 year-old Haya Tedeschi waiting in her room in the town of Gorizia (in the area of Trieste) on the Italian-Slovenian border - waiting for the son who was snatched from her, as a baby, in 1944.
The book has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, and I have reviewed Drndić's other translated novels extensively (see below), but I will just focus here on how she so cleverly combines archival fact with fictional characters and intertextual references to produce something unique.
Haya Tedeschi's early life and her family history, in the first third of the novel, set in the turbulent first decades of the 20th Century, are based (with permission) of the real-life Fulvia Schiff - see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trieste-True-Story-Frank-Gent-ebook/dp/B007MEWA7S.
But Fulvia Schiff married an allied soldier and settled in the UK, whereas Drndić has Haya instead meet a German soldier and become pregnant with his child:
A thirty year old German in a uniform comes into her tobacco shop. Oh, he is handsome as a doll. The German already has the polish nickname Lalka, but at this point, when she first sees the dashing German, Haya knows nothing of that, the dashing german tells her later, I am no Lalka, you are my Lalka.
This German soldier is based on (without permission) and indeed essentially is the real-life SS officer Kurt Franz (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Franz), who rose from a cook at the Sonnerstein euthansia camp to commandant at Treblinka. His nickname Lalka - baby face - wholly inappropriate for his sadistic behaviour (http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/revolt/berliner.html) - in 1965 he was found guilty of collective murder of at least 300,000 people, and 35 counts of murder involving at least 139 people. The real-life Franz did spend time in the area of Trieste and Gorizia after the Treblinka camp was dismantled although is not known to have fathered a child with a local.
In the novel, Franz abandons his pregnant, Jewish, lover, but when she gives birth her child is snatched. She 62 years later, as the novel opens, finds that the boy was taken into the Lebensborn program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn) and eventually placed with a German foster family.
Drndić has this boy be the photographer who accompanied the real-life journalist Niklas Frank when he interviewed in 1982 the author Drndić has acknowledged as her most important influence, the great Thomas Bernhard (https://www.thomasbernhard.org/interviews/1982intnf.shtml for translated extracts from the real-life interview)
This interview took place in Gmunden where Thomas Bernhard lived in his renovated farmhouse, close to Schloss Oberweis (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Oberweis) which, during the war, was renamed Alpenland - the base of the Lebensborn organisation.
And the real-life Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Frank) himself was to realise over time that his beloved father Hans Frank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Frank) who died when he was 7, was actually a Nazi war criminal, executed at Nuremburg.
In this novel, The son's adoptive parents are also closely acquainted with Isabella Fischer from the twin novellas Doppelgänger (published earlier than Trieste in the original Croatian), having acquired some of her confiscated property, and indeed they are the people who send her the chocolates she receives each year in the earlier book.
And Haya herself reappears in the later novel Belladonna, where Andreas Ban reads this novel, meets Haya Tedeschi, and later meets the English translator Ellen Elias-Bursać.
Stunning. 4.5 stars.
Bibliography.
Daša Drndić's last 6 works of fiction were:
Doppelgänger (2002), translated into English as Doppelgänger ( 2018) by Celia Hawkesworth and SD Curtis
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2673417580
Shortlisted for 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize
Leica Format (2003), translated into English as Leica Format (2015) by Celia Hawkesworth
Sonnenschein (2007), translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Shortlisted for 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
April u Berlinu (2009), as yet untranslated
Belladonna (2012), translated into English as Belladonna 2017, by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2338018537
Winner 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 EBRD Literature Prize and 2018 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize
E.E.G (2016), translated into English as E.E.G. (2018), by Celia Hawkesworth
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2689942293