The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, first published in 1962, is the third book in Giorgio Bassani’s “Novel of Ferrara” six-part series but can be read as a standalone.

At its most basic level, it is a story of unrequited love between two Italian college students, but it’s so much more than that. It touches on issues related to Italian Fascism, racial discrimination (all the characters are Jewish) and class, and explores memory, loyalty, friendship and family.

The story is told by an unnamed first-person narrator looking back on the events of his life in the northern Italian city of Ferrara some 20 years earlier. We find out right from the start that members of the Finzi-Contini family, with whom he was close, perished in a German death camp during the Second World War.

And then we are plunged into a slow-moving tale of how he befriended brother and sister Alberto and Micòl even though he was from a lower socio-economic class, and how he later fell in love with Micòl.

The narrative cleverly weaves in the changing political circumstances of the time to show how decisions by those in power directly affected the lives of ordinary citizens.

The story is set mainly during 1938 and 1939, right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Racial laws have been introduced that restrict where Jewish people in Italy can socialise.

Alberto and Micòl open up their private tennis court, in the walled garden of their grand family home, to friends who have been ousted from the town’s official tennis club, and this is how our narrator grows close to the Finzi-Contini siblings and their slightly older friend, Giampi Malnate, a Christian and socialist with strongly held views that put him at odds with Italy’s Fascist rulers.

The foursome soon becomes three when Micòl heads to Venice to write her thesis. While she’s gone, our narrator, who is working on his own thesis, is expelled from the Public Library, so he is invited to use the personal library of Professor Ermanno Finzi-Contini which contains almost 20,000 books, “a large number of which — he told me — concerned mid- and late-nineteenth-century literature”.

Being let into the inner sanctum of the Finzi-Continis like this also allows our narrator to develop a personal relationship with Micòl’s father, who becomes a mentor, valued for his kindness, intellect and anti-Fascist beliefs.

This warm, nostalgic tone imbues most of the novel, but there is a dark, almost self-pitying undercurrent because while our narrator is forced to contend with large political issues beyond his control, on the personal front, things aren’t much better. His desire for Micòl comes to a head in a confronting scene towards the end of the book, one that could be construed as a violation (at worst) and sexual harassment (at best).

Later, frustrated by Micòl’s lack of sexual interest in him, he convinces himself that she is seeing someone else, which is why she has not returned his love.

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Ho affrontato questo libro senza saperne praticamente niente, a parte che il titolo non mi era sconosciuto e che era in qualche modo un "classico" da leggere.

Ho scoperto così la Ferrara degli anni fascisti, assieme a un gruppo di ragazzi dell'alta borghesia ebraica. Ragazzi che vivono le loro vite normalmente, malgrado il fascismo dilagante, le leggi razziali e le restrizioni che poco a poco li colpiscono.
Il protagonista che studia lettere, prepara la tesi e sogna un futuro da scrittore; il ricco e svogliato Alberto, che per certi versi sembra quasi precorrere i futuri giovani decadenti dell'America di Fitzgerald; Micol, la bella Micol che diventa poco a poco l'ossessione del protagonista, che invece frequenta l'università a Venezia, colleziona ampolline di vetro e preferisce il passato al presente.
A unire tutti loro e altri coetanei, il tennis, praticato nel campo della loro villa quando gli ebrei vengono espulsi dal circolo locale.

La politica, le leggi razziali, il fascismo e l'oppressione degli ebrei restano sempre sullo sfondo, opprimenti e minacciose ma mai al punto da dominare la scena: fungono da sfondo, da motori scatenanti e da intermezzi, ma la scena viene sempre lasciata a questioni più comuni: il sentimento del protagonista per Micol, la curiosità che diviene conoscenza, l'amicizia che diviene amore e poi ossessione, e soprattutto a senso unico; la gelosia, l'ira, l'irrazionalità e le accuse, i melodrammi.

Tutto molto bello, ben scritto, e con cui ci si può immedesimare in qualche misura anche adesso.
Ma ammetto che leggere le scene in cui l'autore si fionda sull'amica per baciarla, anche quando lei più e più volte gli dice di non farlo, nel 2022 lascia una sensazione amara e fastidiosa che immagino non venisse nemmeno contemplata sessant'anni fa.

Ho adorato comunque questo spaccato di vita in un periodo in cui solitamente i libri mostrano ben altri aspetti della società. Qui invece si vedono ebrei addirittura compiacenti col fascismo, certi che tutto passerà e che non succederà niente di grave. Il minimizzare fino all'ultimo, così come era stato fatto in tanti altri luoghi prima del disastro, mentre poco a poco gli amici di prima diventavano estranei e la popolazione che un tempo ti era vicina ti voltava lentamente le spalle cercando di allontanarsi.
I sogni per il futuro, le discussioni con gli amici ebrei, con i gentili e con i parenti.

Dopo un inizio non brillante non pensavo mi sarebbe piaciuto così tanto.

This one grew on me as it progressed. Seemed like a funereal recollection, almost disinterested in its subjects. But the slow-burning development of the story turns it into something quite different.

A poignant story of life and loss.

A side-note about this particular edition. I read a paperback from Quartet Books that is a reprint from 1978 apparently based on the first English edition from Faber and Faber published in 1965. There is no mention of the translator! According to the Wikipedia page about the book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_the_Finzi-Continis), the translator had to be Isabel Quigley, who is considered, according to her Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Quigly), one of the top ten translators of Italian literature in the past 70 years (comment from 1998). I think her name should be mentioned(*) because I read the English version, and it is quite important to have a feeling of how well the translation is done. I cannot compare translations in any way, but it felt like a job well done, if I can put it that way. There are long drawn-out sentences that convey the slow and even lethargic passing of time, which is quite suitable for the warm weather scenes. The way the sentences ramble make it all seem conversational. Perhaps the narrator is telling you this tale from the depths of an armchair, pipe in hand. I ended up looking at a Google map of Ferrara multiple times during the reading of this book because the place and the people seemed so alive despite knowing they were dead. These places were so real.

Yes, I am commenting on the length of sentences because they did make me step back from the actual story now and then, and yet, they were the length they needed to be. They fit the story. The looking back and all that. I "only" liked the book as per the 3-star rating here even though the book is a classic. Toward the end, I felt an irritation at both the narrator and Micol. For some reason, I was reminded of my own change of heart toward the book "Crime and Punishment". There is no real connection between the two books. It's just that when I read it at age 18, I felt sorry for everyone in the book and probably would have given it a 5-star rating. 7 years later, I read it in a book club of women all in their 20s and 30s and we all thought Raskolnikov was an idiot and that we could have committed murder far better than he had. With this book, I was past the "romantic tragedy" (if those are even appropriate words at all) of lives soon to be lost. I was angry that they weren't doing more to fight back. Of course, I was unaware of how fascism had unfolded in Italian and how insidious it crept into society. I know Bassani didn't attempt to write about the bigger picture. This is supposed to be tales from the places he knew from his childhood and his youth. They are indeed beautifully written, but I cannot avoid looking at the terribly tragedy running through it all. It is almost as if the Finzi-Continis in their garden were already living in their tomb while alive.

I can recommended reading this review of the book: https://newrepublic.com/article/99828/griogrio-bassani-garden-finzi-contini

(* - I wrote this on the incorrect version of the book here in Goodreads. My point is that the physical book that I read makes no mention at all of the translator, and that is what I think is a big mistake.)

"Nella vita, se uno vuol capire veramente come stanno le cose di questo mondo, deve morire almeno una volta."
In questo dolce libro il protagonista ci racconta dell'amore che prova per la sua Micòl, un amore forte dolce e passionale perchè è il primo amore. Lo scrittore ce lo racconta nel periodo immediatamente precendente lo scoppio della seconda guerra mondiale, in un ambiente della media-alta borghesia ebraica.
Abbiamo il sentore delle leggi razziali, del mondo in subbuglio dove Hitler e Mussolini stanno lavorando per far volgere il tutto nel peggior modo possibile! Questi ragazzi che vivono la loro giovinezza ritrovandosi a giocare a tennis e parlando di arte, letteratura e politica dove intorno a loro c'è ricchezza e molta per quei tempi e continuano imperterriti nel loro modo di vivere evitando di guardare la realtà che si sta profilando crudele, sanguinosa e discriminatoria. Un libro che ci aiuta a ricordare "gli orrori della persecuzione razziale, la crudeltà della storia, i ricordi brucianti di una stagione irripetibile".