The Garden of Finzi-Continis

Bassani captures life at the brink of impending doom in a magical world of youth and promise. The characters are not numb to the danger on the horizon. I see certain resemblances to our present situation. Bassani lived through the mid 30's to long after post war in Ferrara when unspeakable crimes occurred, until liberation. The story lives with the reader long after the last page is closed. Haunting and beautiful.

We know so much about German Jews and the problems they faced with the Nazism, and so little on the Italian Jews in the same time, that Giorgio Bassani's `The Garden of Finzi-Continis' stands as a remarkable thing. This is not the only reason to read and praise this novel. This book is filled with wonderful characters that make it a great work of fiction.Set in an Italian small town called Ferrara, `Garden...' follows a couple of years in the life of the narrator. Years after the events, he is forced to remember the whole story, and that's the beginning of the narrative's journey. We follow him from a small and naïve boy worried with school grades until when he is a grown-up in love with the Finzi-Contini girl and has his political sense developed.Bassani has a wonderful prose. Many pages of the book are devoted to beautifully evocative descriptions of things like the house, the city, the garden. That is one of the things that make this book so magical.Another one is its vivid characters. Everyone seems to be real people and not literary creations, and this is a great achievement for a writer. The narrator is the person who goes through the most drastic transformation. Throughout his story he learns the importance of his past and roots, and how they are place in contemporary history. `The Garden of the Finzi-Contini' is one of those books that don't take too long to read, but take a very long period to be forgotten. And to some people it will never be forgotten.

This is a love story, a story about growing up, a story about discovering one's three rich heritages (Italian and Jewish and literary). And it is a story about a boy becoming a writer. There must be thousands such coming-of-age stories; thousands of stories about that first (and naturally unrequited) love; and, since most of the people who write these stories are authors there are even a few tales of how boys grow up to become writers. And yet this tale is haunting. It grips the reader and never lets him go till the end and even long after. And that is because this is also a story about a murder.The murder is barely mentioned. Oh, the narrator invokes it once or twice when for example he tells us that when he looked out at his family members during a Passover meal "most of whom, a few years later would be swallowed up by German crematory ovens" he found almost all of them terribly bland and bourgeois. He also mentions it at the beginning when he informs us that his first (unrequited) love, Micol, her father, her mother, and her Grandmother were all "deported to Germany in the autumn of `43". But that's not what this story is about.This is not a story about concentration camps and the mechanized degradation there. This is a hauntingly, heart-breakingly beautiful story about a young man and a first love in a wondrous garden. A story that comes to an abrupt end because the children (the real flowers in the Garden of the Finzi-Continis) are made to pay the ultimate price because the Italians around them first resented that "the Jews were not enough like the others and then, having ascertained their almost total assimilation into their surroundings, [resented] the opposite: that they were just like the others." It is, in the end (to paraphrase Amos Oz), about Jews who were not to be special and who were not to be banal; who were not to be.

A few months ago, I was visiting a friend in Ferrara and while walking through the streets of the town I was reminded of the Finzi Continis' sad story.Going by the wall surrounding the house where they used to live, I went back to the times of their youth(the 30s and 40s)and I could nearly hear their happy voices, Alberto, Micol and their friends playing tennis in the big garden, Alberto on his wheeling chair watching the others play.Ghosts of a time past, happy young people unware of what was waiting for them just round one of the corners of their lives.I read the the book a few years ago and I was impressed by the sad, but never tragic style of the author Giorgio Bassani.The story is a recollection of the life of a Jewish family from Ferrara before and during the Nazi-fascist persecutions of world war two.The story of the one-sided love of the author for Micol Finzi Contini the Jewish girl who seems to foresee her destiny and refuses to return his love. She seems to know about her deportation to a concentration camp somewhere in Germany where would be lost any trace of her and her family.She is doomed and she knows it.Mr. Bassani tells his children this story while visiting an Etruscan necropolis, it is his story too and sadly points out that there are no tombs where to grieve and pray for Micol and her family, there is only their memory left in the hearts of those who loved them

William Weaver's translation of Giorgio Bassani's novel is as faultless as a perfect tennis match played at high noon on a glorious spring day. His choice of words is colloquial yet not dated, to the point and limpid as the waters of an utterly still and silent lake: looking through them, you see the lost world of the Finzi-Contini risen from the ashes, glittering and new, as if it had never perished. And thank you, Mr. Bassani, for bringing us back to the impossibly lovely yet gruesomely doomed Italy of your youth. There is much to think about here: what becomes of the opportunity of love when not grasped in time; the complex twists and turns of the human heart, which barely understands itself, let alone another; the tragedy of irrepeatable human beings when they are destroyed by the invincible ignorance and rage of politicians possessing kindergarten imaginations and state-of-the-art weapons of repression. Giorgio Bassani has created a world which is startlingly real. One has the idea that, should one stroll through Ferrara today, one could still hear the far-off echo of tennis balls being whacked beyond a clump of trees on the other side of the Finzi-Continis' high wall on a deathless day in, say, 1939. Long after the shouts of the dictators have died down, these people live on through the curious and graceful immortality which is conferred upon them by this book. Meet them!

This text was on the Intro to European Literature reading list at Princeton University. Best book of the course, and one of my favorites of all time. This is a story of love and remembrance written from the vantage of an older Italian Jew looking back on the second world war. Micol Finzi-Continis is like every boy's first crush, and though we all move on in life from past to present, we always remember fondly those we loved before. Though written originally in Italian, I found the translation to be beautiful. A quick read, but it leaves a lasting impression.