The May 1953 issue of the Giornale di Trieste reported the news of the arrival in Trieste of the penguin "Marco".

Having arrived from the distant lands of the Cape of Good Hope, where a singular destiny had led him, (...) Marco was seduced by the affectionate attentions of an old sea dog, the boatswain of the motor vessel Europa

Drawing inspiration from a real-life event, Carminati has written a coming-of-age novel that lends a touch of lightness to a troubled moment in Trieste’s history, between 1950 and the riots of November 1953, when a protest over the secret agreement between the United States and Yugoslavia—assigning the city to Italy and Istria to Yugoslavia—ended in deaths and injuries. Niccolò is still a child in 1950,

with few worries and plenty of freedom,
when he flees Lošinj for Trieste, where he goes to live with an uncle. In a hidden box, he accidentally discovers a telegram reporting that his father was missing, presumed drowned, following the sinking of the steamship on which he was sailing. Why had his uncle never shown it to him? Perhaps
because he wanted me to remain a child for as long as possible, he wanted me to believe in the tooth mouse, Saint Nicholas bearing gifts, the Befana, shooting stars, my father alive somewhere in Africa. I looked out toward the open sea. The waves shuddered: (...) ten years earlier my father had died at sea, and for ten years he had lived only in my imagination.

From a newspaper clipping (the January 1953 issue of Il Tempo), Niccolò learns that four sailors from the sunken steamship were saved in a lifeboat; what if his father were among them? What if he were still alive somewhere along the shores of the Indian Ocean, where the vessel had gone down? In an act blending hope, courage, and a spirit of adventure, Niccolò signs on as a deckhand on a steamship bound for Cape Town—still an adolescent and, to make matters worse, one who suffers from seasickness. Perhaps the search for his father is merely an occasion to come of age, much like Jim in Treasure Island (see the review of Treasure Island on this site).

I would return home,
Niccolò admits,
with a new map: the one charted by my feet and my eyes.

The novel is constructed with great skill and elegance, successfully weaving an adolescent’s feelings, curiosities, and discoveries into an engaging plot, complete with its share of surprises, albeit perhaps somewhat predictable ones. There are no villains! We are overtaken by a sort of hopeful cheer, accustomed as we are to despotic tales even in young adult fiction: consider Borders no Borders or the sprawling Berlin saga (see the reviews on this site). It is all rather excessive—too facile, one might say, and just as detached from the historical events of Trieste as it is from today’s reality. We must offer a positive perspective, yet we must do so while acknowledging current problems, lest we succumb to the lure of a "pretty fairy tale."

The true merit of the novel lies in the writing: elegant, syntactically flawless, and lexically rich. Carminati recovers the very best of our language through a judicious use of punctuation, avoiding the stylistic traps so prevalent today: from the overuse of the full stop, which results in fragmented discourse, as in Nicola Lagioia’s acclaimed La Ferocia, to the rambling syntax where the flow of words relies not on punctuation but on mere sound, as in Federica Manzon’s overrated Alma (see the reviews on this site).

Why read it? It is enjoyable, and it is a fine story.

Assessment: medium-low.

A Penguin in Trieste