Shanghai - Joseph Kanan

 I've long been a fan of Joseph Kanon.   Several of his novels have already been reviewed on this blog.   Picking up Shanghai (2024) was pretty much a no-brainer.

Actually, it is step forward for Kanon.   It's shorter, for one thing, focussing solely on the central relationships; Daniel Lohr, an active German Communist, forced to leave Nazi Berlin in 1939; his uncle Nathan, who funds his passage from Trieste to Shanghai; Leah Auerbach, also on the boat, who is fleeing Vienna with her mother; and Yamada, high-ranking officer of the Kempeitai, the Japanese equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo.

You can always be confident that Kanon has done deep research.   I knew where things stood in China in the late Thirties - the Japanese invasion, the Rape of Nanking - but I had never heard of the Kempeitai.   Likewise, I knew Shanghai was a British outpost and therefore assumed it was highly corrupt, but I had no idea of just how corrupt.

Nathan (with the assumed surname Green) came to Shanghai from America where, it is suggested, he may have run up againt the mob.   Now he runs a night club casino and is about to open a major new one, appropriately called the Gold Rush, in partnership with the rival gangsters Wu Tsai and Xi Ling.   On opening night, Nathan is shot.   Daniel suddenly finds himself in charge.   Leah, who he fell for on the journey East, has been taken up by Yamata, thus instantly becoming unacceptable to any eligible westerner.   

Getting Nathan medical assistance has brought Daniel back in contact with his old comrades in the Communist underground.   They want him to carry out a special mission...

To say more would be to give the game away.   The point is, Kanon builds a tremendous amount of both detail and nuance into a highly compressed plot.   The prose is much tighter than in previous books.   Kanon was always a classy prosodist but his Shaghai style packs extra punch.   Like I say, I was always a fan.   Shanghai is the best of Kanon I have read so far.

As a Man Grows Older - Italo Svevo

Svevo's story is unique. As a young man in Trieste he wrote two unsuccessful novels, of which this is the second. In middle age he befriended a young Irishman living in the city. He happened to mention his writing. The young man happened to be James Joyce. A decade later, the now famous Joyce found a publisher for Svevo's third novel, The Confessions of Zeno, which was published with great success in 1923, thereby encouraging English language translations of the earlier novels including this, in 1932, by Beryl de Zoete. Svevo had finished a fourth book and started a fifth when he died in a car crash in 1928. I'm guessing the car was the product of his belated success. And his name wasn't Italo Svevo anyway. He was Ettore Schmitz. Nonetheless his widow called herself Livia Svevo when she published a memoir of her husband.

Emilio Brentani, the hero of As a Man Grows Older, is a self-portrait. Like Svevo he aspired to literary success when young and missed. He now has a dreary office job and lives with his spinster sister Amalia, in Trieste, of course; nowhere could be better suited to this nowhere nobody. Emilio still considers himself an artistic man about town. He cultivates artistic friends like the sculptor Balli and - the modernist touch which appealed to Joyce - he overindulges in fashionable self-scrutiny. Every action, every emotion is gone over and over in his head, almost as if he is living an autobiographical novel. When he falls head over heels for the beautiful young Angiolina he builds himself a mountain of reasons why he shouldn't. His friend Balli, who fancies Angiolina himself and, in any case, doesn't want to lose his friend Emilio, encourages his neurotic behaviour. Emilio's sister Amalia, the only other significant character in the novel, likewise frets about losing her protector whilst consoling herself with erotic dreams of the flamboyant alpha male Balli. Angiolini couldn't care less. She is a poor young woman who knows that her beauty is her escape. She has had plenty of suitors before and makes no attempt to hide them. Emilio gets so tangled up in his strategems that he encourages her to become engaged to an unscrupulous tailor. He encourages her to sleep with her fiance so that he, Emilio, doesn't have to shoulder the guilt of deflowering her. Angiolina has no problem with this; her virginity is a distant memory - and, of course, the tailor dumps her the moment he has had his wicked way.

It is plain, spinsterish Amalia who pays the heaviest price for all this neurasthenic nonsense. Emilio comes home one day to find her literally deranged with frustrated passion. Emilio at least has the human decency to look after his sister, though not without asking Balli's advice first and accepting the medical guidance of Balli's friend, who cheerfully admits he has no idea what he is doing. It doesn't end well. Angiolina, meanwhile, has eloped with a cashier who has prudently robbed his own bank. Even then Emilio has to go through an elaborately staged charade of him abandoning her.

The novel is light but very modern in its time and still entertaining today. It is nothing like a Joyce novel but you can easily see what appealed to him here. Svevo is a writer who deservedly stands on his own, a unique voice unfairly forgotten.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere - Jan Morris

This, it makes very clear from the outset, is Jan Morris's last book.  Though she is still very much alive at the time of writing, Morris decided to call it a day in 2001, perhaps because she is at heart a travel writer and she was in her mid-seventies in 2001.  She chose to make her exit with a reflection on Trieste because it is both bizarre and at the same time mundane - an outpost of Northern Italy, hugely redeveloped in the Nineteenth Century as the seaport of the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire, but really part of Slovenia.  She also spent time there immediately after World War II and suggests that her first true travel writing was done here.

I say 'suggests' because that is the magic of Jan Morris.  She can describe a house, a restaurant, a public piazza in a few crisp sentences, but what really matters are the sensations and memories it evokes.  The city enclave comes across as a fading beauty, not really Italian and certainly not Slovenian.  Naturally James Joyce is a presence but I had not realised that Italo Svevo was a Triestine or that Rilke wrote his masterpiece in the area.

I am new to Morris (but will be back).  I knew her story, however - one of the great personal journeys of British culture in the second half of the Twentieth Century - and wonder if she relies too much here on the reader knowing her background.  Does a new reader who doesn't remember her in her heyday understand how the wartime soldier writing his essay down by the harbour in Trieste became the woman who returns in the millennium?