About This Book
A young man plunges into student life, in flight from an overbearing father, in search of an identity of his own making. He is like everyone else in his quest for a future he cannot yet understand. His experiences, often comic, always innocently human, are an exploration of the concept of boundaries. But in choosing to study in Trieste, a city of many-layered histories and ethnicities, a city of brilliant sunshine and ferocious gales, he finds that life, and love, throw him more questions than answers.
It is a tale of Everyman, but more than that: in the hands of Diego Marani, author of the celebrated New Finnish Grammar, this wry and affecting novel leads the reader on a nostalgic and thought-provoking journey made wholly individual by its evocation of place – the celestial city of Trieste.
‘I did not think that one could weep for a city. But at that time I did not know that cities are women, one can fall in love with them and never forget them.'
'In Diego Marani's The Celestial City,translated by Graham Anderson Trieste provides the setting for a coming-of-age novel from the author of the highly acclaimed New Finnish Grammar. The nameless hero, who elects to study translation and interpreting at the University of Trieste, must leave his Emilia Romagna home and the punitive asceticism of his bookish and pedantic father.
The intimate description of this Oedipal tussle is the best part of the work as the son struggles to meet the father's maddeningly imprecise expectations and resents the calculated tyranny of his emotional distance. As was the case with Finnish in the earlier novel, so is the situation with Slovene in the latest; language and love for Marani are ever-troublesome playmates.'
Michael Cronin in The Irish Times
