Trieste

'But in reality, of course, memory fails us. Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has been heaped up, the moraines and deposits are insuperable.' This famous line from W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn could almost be read as a manifesto of Daša Drndić's novel Trieste, a dazzling meditation on memory, irrecoverability and absence which mixes hard historical reconstruction with fiction, and probes the limits of both.

Trieste opens with an old woman, Haya Tedeschi, sitting alone in Northern Italy awaiting the retiurn of her son after sixty-two years. Gradually, the reasons for his absence become clear: fathered by an SS officer, he was abducted by the Nazis as part of their Lebensborn programme for "racially pure" Europe, and never made it home again. The ensuing narrative largely takes place within the multiplying refractions of Haya's kaleidoscopic memory - stories of loss, resistance and atrocity that speak in a clamour of competing voices. The past, quite literally, refuses to lie quiet, and as much as anything else this is a novel about remembrance and its discontents. 

However, it's also a novel about Sebald's 'moraines and deposits', about how we inherit the past through a bricolage of shapes and quotations, images and clichés. The text is packed with typographical breaks, chunks of T S Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges, and punctuated by a running counterpoint of photographs, ranging from the cryptic to the horrifyingly literal: cigarette cards of German athletes, museum artefacts, photographs of concentration camps from which uniformed figures gaze out inscrutably. Tedeschi burrows into the archives of the Holocaust, reconstructing crimes, speculating fruitlessly on the subsequent careers of their perpetrators, and bringing up scraps of evidence - photographs, biographies, names, dates. At one point, Drndić devotes a whole chapter to a list of names: 9,000 of them, all real people deported from Northern Italy in the Final Solution. In any other hands, this gesture might run the risk of seeming crass or overly literal: it's testament to Drndić's narrative intelligence, and her matchless poise and control, that it seems exactly the right thing to do. In giving up the space of the page to these densely printed names, Drndić acknowledges the limits of what fiction can lay claim to. But she also has her narrator insist that 'behind every name there is a story': and it's here, as throughout this challenging, compendious novel, that she achieves the feat of conjuring a lost plenitude out of catastrophe, negation and silence.