The Garden of the Finzi-Continis: A Novel (Library of the Holocaust) - Hardcover

Bassani, Giorgio; Weaver, William

3.78

12,518 ratings by Goodreads

9781567310993: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis: A Novel (Library of the Holocaust)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567310990 ISBN 13: 9781567310993

Publisher: Fine Communications, 1997

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A great commercial success when first published--and an Academy Award-winning film in 1970--Giorgio Bassani's wrenching story of Ferrara, Italy, and the aristocratic Finzi-Contini family during the dangerous days of the Fascist regime has become a modern classic. As a middle-class Jew, the narrator of the novel has contact with the detached Alberto and Micol Finzi-Contini only when they come to school to sit for final exams, and at the synagogue during the major holy days. For the most part, the Finzi-Continis remain isolated from the rest of the town behind the walls of their elegant estate. When Mussolini issues the anti-Semitic edicts of 1938, the narrator is expelled from the tennis club, and it is then that he is invited to play in the private courts beyond the Finzi-Contini garden. As the nightmare of the Holocaust descends upon this tranquil world, all are forced from its serenity and insularity. Giorgio Bassani, who was imprisoned until the Allies liberated Italy, won worldwide acclaim and numerous prestigious prizes for his novels and poetry.

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Review:

Giorgio Bassani's masterwork has Vittorio de Sica's 1971 film adaptation to thank for its dual success and obscurity. Not enough people know that this tale of a middle-class Jewish youth's obsession with the far more aristocratic Micol Finzi-Contini stems from a novel, not a novelization. Bassani's doom- and tomb-ridden examination of one-sided love is far more complex--about individuals' inability to contend with personal and political annihilation. Events call for heroism, yet it seems "downright absurd that now, all of a sudden, exceptional behavior was demanded of us." The narrator writes in retrospect, 13 years after World War II's end, and reveals the Finzi-Continis' 1943 deportation to Germany right from the start: "Who could say if they found any sort of burial at all?"

As Fascist racial laws go from strength to strength, the family, which had long isolated itself from the other inhabitants of Ferrara, opens its walled grounds and tennis court to other young Jews and even returns to the local temple. Unfortunately, the situation encourages the narrator's dream that Micol will return his love, and she is forced into cruel honesty. "She looked into my eyes, and her gaze entered me, straight, sure, hard: with the limpid inexorability of a sword."

The author has re-created a tragic era in which even nobility could not outrun events, let alone admit they needed to. (For a nonfiction account of the fates of five Italian Jewish families under fascism, see Alexander Stille's Benevolence and Betrayal.) Bassani's elision of historical and personal agony is furthermore superbly translated by William Weaver. All is foretold in the novel's Manzonian epigraph, "The heart, to be sure, always has something to say about what is to come, to him who heeds it. But what does the heart know? Only a little of what has already happened."

About the Author:

Giorgio Bassani was born in 1916. From 1938 onwards he became involved in various anti-fascist activities for which he was imprisoned in 1943. His works include The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and Five Stories of Ferrara (Within the Walls), which won the Strega Prize. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was awarded the Viareggio Prize in 1962 and was made into a feature film.

William Weaver was an award-winning poet and translator. He died in 2013.

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