THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

by Giorgio Bassani ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 1977

William Weaver's new translation--rich and fluid--and DeSica's now-familiar, delicately heartbreaking film should conspire to regenerate interest in Bassani's splendid story, first published here in 1965. As in the film: constellated by the Italian ""racial laws"" of the Late Thirties, the lives of the rich Jewish family of the Finzi-Continis and the more middle-class clan of the narrator go on as best they can, clutching at normalcy with whatever means at their disposal. Kicked out as Jews from the tennis club, the young men and women of Ferara assemble within the ""great private forest"" that surrounds the ""magna domus"" of the rich and leisured Finzi-Continis to play tennis, flirt, fall in and out of love. In a matter of years they'll all die at the hands of the Nazis. But there's a dimension that only the novel can deliver--and that is the social stratification of the Ferarese Jews, the illusionary but all encompassing ""differences"" that makes their common death to come so devastating. Bassani's richness of detail in this matter is Proustian, sometimes even static: a drawing-out of a small sideways glance at an almost inexpressibly sad situation. And it's this that is most impressive: Bassani does not telegraph his punches; though their doom is guaranteed, his characters are more than calves fattened for the slaughter--which, in a way, is a novelist's cruelty--and instead are allowed the dignity of their blindness.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 1977

ISBN: 0156345706

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION