Of the books I've read in Italian, this was the most difficult. The style fits the setting: noble families in Ferrara, Italy.

Bello il colloquio col padre!

A local bookshop is hosting a 'Pages of Italy' book club -- I never manage to read the books in time but I'm reading them just the same. Melancholic but enjoyable story set in Ferrara in the years leading up to World War II. Our narrator is a young Jewish man flush with unrequited love as a whole bunch of other stuff goes on around him especially the growing sense that something really bad is just around the corner for everyone.

Edited 6/7/19: see last section

4.5 stars

... for me, no less than for her, the memory of things was much more important than the possession of them, and in comparison with that memory all possession, in itself, seemed just disappointing, delusive, flat, insufficient....The way I longed for the present to become the past at once, so that I could love it and gaze fondly at it any time...It was our vice, this: looking backward as we went ahead.

(translated by [a:William Weaver|6921|William Weaver|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1414127047p2/6921.jpg])

The inner flap of this edition mentions Marcel Proust, but even without that I'm sure I would've thought of him, not only with the above passage, but with the unnamed narrator's love for the tennis-playing Micòl, at an age when love equals jealousy, a love without the understanding that the insecurities and accusations that arise from the lesser emotion will not endear you to the beloved.

Though she's seen through the narrator's rear-view mirror, Micòl is no Proustian Albertine. For only one thing, Micòl's family, not the narrator's, is the one with money; but more importantly, unlike Albertine, Micòl is not a concept but a character who speaks her mind, acts and reacts (though perhaps the two differences are not unrelated). It is Ferrara, though, with its city walls and ducal gardens, that is the main character, a city as insular as Micòl's family.

We know from the beginning that this Jewish family living in Fascist Italy in the late 1930s is doomed. They continue to live as they always do, ignoring a certain future, even making plans to enlarge a tennis court that their non-Jewish friends are forbidden to play on. Political thought is represented in the character of their Communist friend, the forward-thinking Malnate, but even he cannot escape.

The familiarity of the novel's tone nagged at me, though I can't put my finger on why it felt that way (and I'm not thinking of Proust now). Most likely, that feeling came from other backwards-looking novels of love and loss I've read that have become an amorphous mass in my so-called memory bank, but that doesn't mean this one isn't a special one.

Because of events listed in the author's biography on the book jacket, I assumed this novel was semi-autobiographical; but it was only today, after paging to the front of the book before writing this review, that I noticed the dedication: To Micòl.

*

I read the first translated-into-English edition and encountered a couple of disconcerting, glaringly obvious, misplaced modifiers: I trust those were corrected in later editions.

*

Reread:

In [b:Within the Walls|25242046|Within the Walls|Giorgio Bassani|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1457073913s/25242046.jpg|5212042] and [b:The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles|16000664|The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles|Giorgio Bassani|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347259353s/16000664.jpg|1521507], the works that come before this novel in this edition https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38730620-the-novel-of-ferrara, Bassani's narrator seems to be commenting on community members staying purposely unaware, not open, to what is about to happen. With my second read of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, I find Bassani's narrator also not facing up to reality, choosing to be in a state of dreaming, of the past, in lieu of facing the present.

Rereading this review, I saw that I marked the same passage (different translations) during my two reads: see the top of the page to compare that to this:

...She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate...She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present "immediately" turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was "our" vice, this: to go forward with our heads forever turned back.

(translated by [a:Jamie McKendrick|15056998|Jamie McKendrick|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png])

I reread the novel in this edition: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38730620-the-novel-of-ferrara .

The short prologue to this book describes a visit by the narrator and his friends to the ancient burial site of the Etruscans at Cerveteri near Rome sometime in the 1950s. In the course of the visit, a discussion arises between one of the friends and his young daughter about why it might be less sad to visit a burial ground from long ago than to visit a present day one. The father claims that it is because we knew and loved the people who are buried in our modern graveyards, whereas the amount of time that has passed makes it as if the people buried in ancient sites never really lived at all, or as if they were always dead. But his young daughter is not convinced. For her the Etruscans deserve our sadness just as much as do our recent dead. Time does not make them less worthy of remembrance.

That prologue seems to underline Giorgio Bassani's intention for his Ferrara novels, of which this book is the third. In this episode I see a strengthening of his determination to preserve the memory of the community he belonged to while growing up in Ferrara in the 1930s, and which has been well dispersed by the time he was writing this book in the late 1950s. He wants to make sure that Time does not make it as if the community never existed, especially since many of its members, in contrast to the Etruscans with their well furnished tombs complete with food, utensils, mosaics, chairs and beds, never had any tomb at all.

The Finzi-Contini family at the centre of this story seem to live as royally as the Etruscans. Their house and gardens are exceptionally large and imposing, and they possess a large and imposing tomb in the Jewish graveyard in Ferrara. Their lives and their after-lives seem well taken care of. In this beautifully written narrative, Giorgio Bassani has ensured that this particular family, who lived as if already safely buried behind the high walls of their garden, are fully deserving of our remembrance. I doubt there is a reader who could ever forget them.

………………...........................
For those who are interested in the parallels I've been finding between Bassani's Ferrara cycle and Marcel Proust's Recherche du Temps Perdu, let me say that there are even more here than in the second book, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles.
The narrator is the same as in that book, and he remains unnamed. In this episode he recounts his memories of the Finzi-Contini family, from when he first became aware of them as a young boy in the late 1920s until he left Ferrara at the outbreak of the war.
Like Marcel Proust's unnamed narrator's obsession with the Guermantes family, which began with a sighting in the church at Combray when he was a child, and which grew and grew with the passing years, Bassani's narrator first spots the Finzi-Contini family in the local synagogue. Each year during Passover, Rosh HaShannah and Hanukkah, he gets another sighting, and becomes more and more interested in this family he rarely sees elsewhere. He becomes particularly fascinated with the son and daughter of the house, Alberto and Micòl, who have private lessons and therefore don't attend the local school.

One day when he is a young teenager, he has a brief encounter with Micòl across the Finzi-Contini garden wall just as Proust's narrator does with Gilberte Swann through the garden railings of Tansonville. From that day onwards, his interest in the Finzi-Continis transforms into an interest in Micòl alone just as Proust's narrator becomes obsessed with Gilberte during his teenage years to the exclusion of all else. Both narrators have to wait a few years before they again encounter the object of their affection and the encounters happen in similar circumstances: an invitation to the loved one's home, for afternoon tea and conversation in the case of Gilberte, for afternoon tea and tennis, in the case of Micòl. Then, in both cases, another period of separation, during which they suffer jealous torment, before a later encounter takes place.
These parallels may not seem much to other readers but they strike me as significant, and I'll be on the lookout for more as I read on through the final books in the cycle

Bassani is the chronicle writer of life in the northern Italian city of Ferrara, and in particular the Jewish inhabitants of that city. In this case it concerns the period immediately prior to the Second World War, just after the promulgating of the racial laws of 1938, as a result of which the Jews in Italy came into isolation. This is the background for this book.

The story itself is about an unnamed narrator, adolescent, who is intrigued by the secluded life of the aristocratic family Finzi-Contini, and especially by their villa and adjacent garden. Up until this point the novel is pretty interesting, but then the narrator falls in love with the very self-conscious daughter of the house, Micol, but she turns him away. Only at the end does he reconcile himself with his fate, and finishes his adolescence period. The whole story bathes in a kind of dusky atmosphere, which reminded me a lot of 'Le Grand Meaulnes' by Alain-Tournier and also a bit of the Flemish writer Maurice Gilliams' 'Elias and the Nightingale'. But the story did not completely captivate me, especially the love story was rather boring.

What is worthwhile is the subtle way in which Bassini describes how the Jews in Ferrara, and certainly the Finzi-Contini, consciously close their eyes to the threatening reality around them; already on page 137 Micol expresses it nicely (even though it refers to trees and buildings): "something that has had its time has to die, but with style". Stylish melancholy as a way of life, that is what the Finzi-Contini cultivate. It's beautiful how Bassaini indicates how attractive that way of looking at things is for our young narrator, but at the same time how he also understands, that he must distance himself from it and start his real life.

a really sweet novel. reading about this nostalgic version of ferrara was beautiful. i could picture all the bike rides mentioned and the parts of the city that were described.

it’s fairly problematic in its depiction of love. there is SA in this but it’s not posed as SA and may be triggering.

Required some patience in the early going, particularly as the translation available through the local library was quite old, but by the end this quiet drama of lives put on hold in the face of massive uncertainty had really taken shape as one of the very best novels I've read this year.

Uma obra prima. Que livro fenomenal. Só senti pena pelo seu final, tão curto e tão apressado. Um romance que decorre antes da segunda guerra mundial, que nos enche de esperança e relembra como era a normalidade de um jovem que se dá com uma das famílias mais refinadas de Itália. Lindíssimo.