Book Review: Origin and Identity: Essays on Svevo and Trieste

Abstract

Elizabeth Schächter's keen integration of sources in Origin and Identity becomes evident in her first chapter, "Trieste: A City of Paradox," which surveys Triestine cultural history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries from a variety of contrasting viewpoints: Habsburg, irredentist, Slovene, fascist. This essay is largely successful at painting a picture, with the "doppia anima" of Svevo at its center, of the unique "multicultural, multi-ethnic border city" that was Trieste at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. But Schächter's otherwise painstaking attention to detail — every page contains from four to eleven footnotes, averaging between six and seven — actually points to a telling deficiency.