The Novel of Ferrara
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Giorgio Bassani’s six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.
Among the masters of twentieth-century literature, Giorgio Bassani and his northern Italian hometown of Ferrara “are as inseparable as James Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste” (from the Introduction). The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani’s six classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life.
Set before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present nuanced and unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is exposed by an exploitative youth; the survivor of the Nazi death camps; the Jewish landowner, returned from exile, to find himself utterly displaced; the schoolteacher whose Communist idealism challenges a postwar generation.
Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, The Novel of Ferrara memorializes a city deeply informed by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. This seminal work seals Bassani’s indomitable reputation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This momentous volume from Bassani (1916 2000), set during, before, and after WWII, is not quite a novel: it's built from four short novels (the most famous is The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) as well as a story collection (Within the Walls), and a series of short stories that were initially published separately (The Smell of Hay). It all hangs together, though bound less by plot or characters than by focus, milieu, time period, and atmosphere. All are set in and around the Jewish community of the northeastern Italian city of Ferrara. All are suffused with grief, dread, and a desperate ambivalence, as the characters try to work out whether war is coming; how to respond to the 1938 racial laws that stripped Jews of their civil rights; and, later, whether post-war life in fascist hotbed Ferrara is possible. Bassani masterfully conveys a creeping moral rot in the story "A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini," the sole surviving deportee returns after the war and becomes a scandal of reminder; in the novella "The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles," the town's beloved doctor, a homosexual, is driven to suicide. In "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," the town's richest Jews, the Finzi-Continis, abandon public life, while the narrator is tormented by his crush on their daughter; the protagonist of the novel The Heron spends a lugubrious day hunting, beset by worries. Many of the characters evade the Nazi death machine, but all feel their separateness and powerlessness (despite being middle- or upper-class), along with the failure of their neighbors not just to save them, but to admit their complicity. Bassani uses his intimate knowledge of Ferrara to build a memorial composed of equal parts grief, affection, frustration, and muted but palpable fury.
