Giorgio Bassani belongs to that extraordinary flowering of Italian Jewish writers, from Natalia Ginzburg to Primo Levi, who came of age under Fascism and thus grew up skeptical, allergic both to absolutism and pious rhetoric…Concentration camp inmates recounted their nightmares of returning home and finding the door locked to them or of discovering that their family members, like Geo Josz's fellow townsmen, were indifferent to their tales. Bassani, in these cultivated worldly-wise stories, so steeped in tenderness, rage and loss, is like someone returned from the underworld to bear witness…Bassani's history of the "little segregated universe" from which he was expelled is essential reading for anyone thirsting for an understanding of the complex density of Europe's multicultural inheritance, or wondering whether the world we know might once again be falling for the temptations of fascism.

08/27/2018
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. (Oct.)

"The best fiction writer of postwar Italy... The Novel of Ferrara has a sensuous and subtle economy, a fulness of dramatic life and depth of art that none of the other three [Calvino, Pasolini, Sciascia] comes near... He wrote about exclusion, desire, betrayal, memory."

"In a new translation by Jamie McKendrick, [The Novel of Ferrara] conveys a feeling of haze and depth, a sense of an old and inscrutable magic no less entrancing for often being dark."

"The book is stippled with shadow and light. Bassani pairs the sorrow of exclusion with the hope of joy and acceptance... The power of Bassani's writing is such that, for a moment, his transitory world seems beautifully everlasting."

"Bassani’s monumental elegy to the city’s doomed Jewish community restores the dignity that it is owed even as it compels us to relive the devastation endured."

"The long overdue first appearance in English of Georgio Bassano's Il romanzo di Ferrara in a single volume, as the great Italian Jewish writer always intended, was very welcome. Translated by Jamie McKendrick as The Novel of Ferrara, it consists of four novels and two collections of stories, all suffused with Bassani's melancholia and sly wit."

"Sitting beside the author watching a fire blaze—destructive, beautiful, and above all compelling—is largely how it feels reading Bassani’s work."

"As a mirror held up to Bassani’s generation, The Novel of Ferrara embodies a cautious optimism about how much this generation–and the ones to follow–might learn from its forebears’ mistakes. In its clear-eyed realism about the limits to such learning, as well as in the empathy with which it insists on pursuing it, Bassani’s Novel is a remarkable achievement."

"[Bassani] could rightly place himself among the great Italian realist writers.… McKendrick is alert to Bassani’s cosmopolitanism and deep affinity for the English literary tradition, and doesn’t obscure the allusions Bassani certainly intended."

"By connecting with Bassani's souls, and sometimes by even becoming one (or all) of them, McKendrick brings to life—anew—the miracle of translation."

"By connecting with [Giorgio] Bassani’s souls, and sometimes by even becoming one (or all) of them, McKendrick brings to life—anew—the miracle of translation."

"Giorgio Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara, in its complete form, splendidly translated by Jamie McKendrick, is a book of immense pathos, eloquence, elegiac splendor, and a requiem for so much of Italian Jewry."

"The Novel of Ferrara can be compared to Joyce's Dubliner's or Balzac's La Comédie Humaine; but a more fitting parallel is the yizkor books that were  produced after the Holocaust to commemorate so many vanished Jewish towns."

"The fiction of this most dispassionate, most merciless and clear-eyed chronicler of the sequences and consequences of history—in stories almost always about the city's decisions about whom to include or exclude as its own—is, in the end, against all the odds, a declaration of love."

"Essential reading for anyone thirsting for an understanding of the complex density of Europe’s multicultural inheritance."