Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (original 1962; edition 2000)

Anna's recommendation

I rented the movie version of Giorgio Bassani's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" more years ago then I care to count. I remembered absolutely nothing about it except for the video cover so I was interested to see if the novel felt familiar.

It did, not not in relation to the story, but because it frequently reminded me of Evelyn Waugh's excellent "Brideshead Revisited," but set in Italy and featuring young Jewish adults trying to hang on the remnants of past lives on the eve of the Holocaust.

While there isn't a whole lot that happens plot wise, the writing is beautiful and carries the story along wonderfully. I enjoyed this book a lot. ( )

Een onmogelijke liefdesgeschiedenis tussen een joodse jongen van gemiddelde komaf en een joods meisje uit de hogere klasse in het fascistische Italië van net voor WOII. Beiden leven zij meer 'met het hoofd achterstevoren' naar het verleden gericht, hetgeen de werkelijkheid onecht, en een liefdesrelatie dus - in de ogen van het meisje - onmogelijk maakt. ( )

An Italian friend said "Oh, that's a book we read at school" when I mentioned it to her; despite that, I liked it, even if it felt a bit like an Italian version of Brideshead Revisited. You know the sort of thing — young man with literary aspirations ingratiates himself with grand-but-doomed family. But there's lots of very enjoyable detail, symbolism that works but doesn't thrust itself down your throat, and political, artistic and emotional storylines that complement each other very stylishly.

Jamie McKendrick's translation for Penguin Modern Classics also seems to work very well, hinting at the linguistic complexity of the original but not getting too adventurous in rendering it into English. ( )

I found this on my shelf, a legacy from a brother-in-law who used to run a bookstore in Milan. Though not a fan of sad books, and even less of the Holocaust as literary subject, I'd say this is not sad. It is heartening and vital, the account of a narrator, himself a Jew but one with a progenitor who was both Jewish and Nazi in WWI, when I take it the Nazis were nationalists like Macchivaelli at the end of the Prince. Mussolini, of course, started from that point, to bring Italy back to its ancient, Roman grandeur and all that.
This novel-autobiography (like Dickens' David Copperfield) accounts for the wide variation in adolescent Jews in Ferrara, one a large communist, one a rich aesthete who finds himself mortally ill,
one a...etc. Their literary endeavors are impressive, Micol the twenty something girl preferring, in an illness, to read light French romances. Her thesis at Venice is on Emily Dickinson. The narrator is an aspiring writer strongly aware of various Italian writers' political stances--from Croce's liberalism to D'Annunzio's empty (?) patriotism to Ungaretti's....etc. Clearly, I am tuncating my comments to keep within my self-imposed bounds of a few minutes' perusal.
One learns how the racial laws were enforced, the Jews first forbidden to take public seats--say, at university--and eventually, their very homes and gardens exappropriated for others's use. I am putting this too mildly. But one also learns of the status of American-made goods--an elevator, a refrigerator,
an Underwood typewriter. ( )