Alma is a feminine name that refers, as a poetic term, to the word soul. And there is a lot of soul in Alma, the protagonist who gives the title to the latest, eponymous novel by Federica Manzon, published by Feltrinelli.

A novel in which the author's Trieste soul emerges powerfully, even if we know she was born in Pordenone. But Trieste, where she studied and graduated, has entered her so much not only to desire to return there often, and she returns there from Milan where she lives and works, but to involve her soul so much as to be reflected in the name of the protagonist.

Soul of Trieste, with all that this city represents, an open door to the Balkans from which, having loosened the ties with the Central European world that permeated it during the years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it today draws nourishment.

And these influences already coexist in Alma: her grandparents tied to Austrian traditions and culture (and also language), her father coming from “over there”, where in Trieste they mean beyond the border. And that border was, after the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Yugoslavia, with all that this now “ex” country means in the history of Trieste in the twentieth century and in this new millennium.

It means the comparison with the Slavic world, first of all, with its lights, but above all with its shadows, which began when fascism, from the 1920s onwards, would have made the population that lived behind the eastern border an "inferior and barbaric race", producing a conflict, then exacerbated in the years immediately following the Second World War by revanchisms that, to quote Claudio Magris, followed the political will to "erase the centuries-old imprint of urban or rural civilizations considered alien, with the intent of radically erasing, with fire and sword, cultures and traditions different from one's own".

A conflict that would drag on practically for the entire century and beyond, at least until the meeting in Basovizza, hand in hand, of the Italian and Slovenian presidents, Mattarella and Pahor.

But Trieste, due to its proximity to the border, or rather, now, with the collapse of Yugoslavia and communism, which have become the borders, has never stopped being that open door to the Balkans, to feel the repercussions. One among all, that of the inter-ethnic war that for almost five years has upset the structure created with the new world order following the Second World War.

Here, “Alma”, Federica Manzon’s novel, tells all this by going through its history, one might say from the inside, with some important figures including her beloved grandfather, with whom she grew up, and but above all her father, to whom she even gives the role of a close collaborator of Tito, and who comes and goes from Trieste and not infrequently takes her, as a child, to the island of Brioni, in Tito’s very private and certainly not socialist residence, whom she meets in his white suit and “his viper eyes”.

Then there is Vili, a boy from Belgrade who her father practically adopts, saving him from the bad end he would surely have met after falling out of favor with Tito and who will grow up with her, and of whom she will become a friend, sister, lover, as well as a symbol - as an adult - of the collapse of Yugoslavia, leading us into the fratricidal war, between Arkan's paramilitary groups and the corpses of the new enemies thrown into the Drina.

The father on one side, Vili on the other, will therefore be the witnesses from within an emblematic fifty-year period that the fifty-three-year-old Alma from Trieste, here in the two meanings of the protagonist's name and of her soul, represents in this intense novel.

There is no shortage of other important Triestine insertions in this interweaving of stories and History such as, for example, the figure of Franco Basaglia and his battles, which is approached thanks to the figure of his mother, collaborator and supporter of the great reformer, for all that he represents in the history of the city.

Just like the traditional baths on the Trieste Riviera, between the free ones of Barcola and the historical ones, which are part of everyday life in Trieste, or the central Serbian Orthodox church of San Spiridione, which will have its importance in the finale, when the last meeting with Vili, who became the bearer, after the death of her father, of her testamentary legacy, will take place here on the day of Serbian Orthodox Easter.

With “Alma” Federica Manzon has given us the work of her maturity as a writer, demonstrating her great talent in knowing how to extricate herself, with an articulated and complex narrative, from the magma of the many materials that feed it.

Diego Zandel
Source: Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa – 02/04/2024