No ha lugar a proceder

Synopsis of No ha lugar a proceder

"Used submarines. I buy and sell." With this announcement, which appeared in the Piccolo Banditore on October 26, 1963, the novel begins. It is not an invention, it was really published. The person who placed it was a professor from Trieste, an obsessive collector of weapons and all kinds of war paraphernalia. Claudio Magris has been inspired by him to construct this hypnotic and disturbing narration that begins with a man determined to set up a "Total Museum of War for the arrival of Peace and the deactivation of History." Along with the professor who conceived it, another central character appears, that of Luisa, daughter of a deported Jew and an African-American sergeant. She will be in charge of setting up this museum, whose rooms will accumulate objects that tell stories. And so, in this novel that contains many stories, the Risiera di San Sabba appears, on the periphery of Trieste, which was the only Nazi extermination camp that existed in Italy; the assassination of Heydrich in Prague at the hands of the Czech resistance; the African slave trade; the story of the German soldier executed by the Wehrmacht for refusing to shoot at the Polish civilian population; the shoes of a Slovenian partisan; the violence in colonial America; the celebration of Hitler's last birthday in Miramare Castle... And in the background Trieste, a border city, a mixture of ethnicities and cultures, converted after the war into the experiment of the Free Territory of Trieste... Magris has written a prodigious novel that breaks the most rigid molds of the genre and shows once again the scope of his literary ambition. A novel about the human capacity to generate horror, but also about the need for memory, love and the epic or daily combat against barbarism.