Within the Walls

"The truth is that the places where you have wept, where you've suffered, where you've had to find many inner resources to keep hoping and resisting, are the ones you grow fondest of."

In a way writing seems to be an act of commemoration. A lot of the good and great writing I've read, anyway, seems to have surging underneath it an urge to mark, to set against the wiping away of all things by time, of places as they once were, of events as they once occurred. And this collection of five stories set in pre-world war two and, barely, post-war Ferrara is testament to this. Following the lives of different residents, Bassani seeks to get to the essence of life in this period when fascism was budding, had blown over, and after it had been show more defeated, and all the ways it affected the lives of those in this town, especially those at the margins of society and vulnerable. The stories "The Final Years of Clelia Trotti", "Lida Mantovani", and "The Stroll before Dinner" were my favourites.

Reading through these stories, as the first of [b:The Novel of Ferrara|38730620|The Novel of Ferrara|Giorgio Bassani|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1523478182l/38730620._SY75_.jpg|66687603] books by the same writer that I'll be reading, I couldn't help but think of the Cavafy poem "The City":


You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.
(As translated by Edmund Keeley) show less

'Within the Walls' is an interesting collection of five tales all set within the confines of the Italian city of Ferrara. They cover such themes as love and betrayal, and the justification for the lives we lead; each sits in the foreground with the Italian city and its difficult history always ready to lean over your shoulder and reframe the plot.

Bassani was a magnificent writer, of that there can be no doubt, and although I did find my attention wandering at times, these stories are still definitely worth the effort of paying close attention to. You learn so much about the craft of writing here. Not sure how to manage the exclamation mark in your prose? Read Bassani! It feels like he's telling you the story directly, and when somebody show more in his audience interjects he must respond with a parenthetical aside capped with a wondrous exclamation mark. Speaking of parentheses, Bassani was also a master of the run-on, multi-clause sentence, with so many branches that it would be nightmare for anybody to draw a sentence diagram of much that you'll find here. One wonders, in fact, if David Foster Wallace read much Bassani before he fell so in love with the footnote... show less

These stories come as a bit of a surprise as I remember the authors Giardino dei Finzi-Conti as a splendid, clear read. Here, however, the language is much more complicated which even made me turn to the English translations, only to find out that it's not just the language that is the problem. The weirdest one of the collection is the story about Clelia Trotti, where the author doesn't bother to explain why the main character is looking for Clelia at all. The one one about the walk before dinner is strange as well. It is as if the author couldn't decide about who should be the main character of this story. The best one is the story about the memorial stone in Via Mazzini: a brilliant satire, exposing the cowardness and hypocrisy of the show more post-war citizens of Ferrara for whom the presence of a holocaust survivor becomes an evermore annoying burden to their consciences. show less

This is the first part of Bassani's Ferrara cycle of novels and stories, the most famous of which is The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. This one is a set of five short stories all set in the first half of the twentieth century, which bear sombre witness to some of the injustices and atrocities of the Fascist era, while retaining a strong sense of the presence of the old city and its history. The cycle moves from the personal to the political. Bassani often writes in long sentences, and this is a book that demands concentration from the reader, and I must admit that I probably missed quite a lot of detail.

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Questa raccolta di racconti ("Lidia Mantovani", "La passeggiata prima di cena", "Una lapide in via Mazzini", "Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti" e "Una notte del '43") valse a Giorgio Bassani il premio Strega 1956. In comune le cinque storie hanno una sorta di dolente consapevolezza e l'ambientazione: Ferrara, avvolta dal pesante panneggio scuro del fascismo. Bassani ci porta nell'animo di questa "gente, per il resto, quasi sempre per bene": la ragazza madre Lidia Mantovani; il dottor Elia Corcos in perenne scontro con la moglie; il sopravvissuto al lager Geo Josz; la vecchia socialista Clelia Trotti, lasciata morire in carcere. Storie diverse eppure vicine, accomunate dalla difficoltà con la quale i protagonisti si adattano a una show more provincia italiana che da un lato consola, dall'altro respinge qualunque cosa non le sia propria. Persone comprese. show less

He tardado mucho en leer este libro, porque no me apañaba con la traducción española. Ahora lo he terminado en la traducción francesa. Son varios cuentos, todos ellos demoledores, sobre la tristeza y la desolación tras la liberación en Ferarra. Porque el hueco que dejó la destrucción de todos los judíos de la ciudad es imposible de llenar.