Il romanzo di Ferrara Series by Giorgio Bassani, Tim Parks

Published in 1958, Giorgio Bassani's novella is the first of his cycle of novels set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara. Although less well known than its successor, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, it offers perhaps the most concise distillation of Bassani's art: elegant, elegiac, and with a profound attachment to the specificities of time and place... morePublished in 1958, Giorgio Bassani's novella is the first of his cycle of novels set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara. Although less well known than its successor, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, it offers perhaps the most concise distillation of Bassani's art: elegant, elegiac, and with a profound attachment to the specificities of time and place. The novella tells the story of the gradual marginalisation, over the course of the 1930s, of the gay doctor Athos Fadigati: once a pillar of bourgeois society, his taste for young men leads to his ostracisation and eventual suicide. Bassani's controlled style and lightness of touch transform a seemingly slight premise into a metaphor for the slide of Italy into fascism. --Ben Hutchinson, The Observer less

Giorgio Bassani's acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature. Made into an Academy Award winning film in 1970, "The Garden of the Finzi Continis "is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewar Italy... moreGiorgio Bassani's acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature. Made into an Academy Award winning film in 1970, "The Garden of the Finzi Continis "is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewar Italy. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, has long been fascinated from afar by the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish family, and especially by their charming daughter Micol. But it is not until 1938 that he is invited behind the walls of their lavish estate, as local Jews begin to gather there to avoid the racial laws of the Fascists, and the garden of the Finzi-Continis becomes a sort of idyllic sanctuary in an increasingly brutal world. Years later after the war, the narrator returns in memory to his doomed relationship with the lovely Micol, and to the predicament that faced all the Ferrarese Jews, in this unforgettably wrenching portrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls." less

Bassani describes a land beyond the city and surrounding countryside. It is a land that lives also in the water, so the active population is made up of people who work there or go there on purpose. This special land belongs to men who fish with boats and also with barrels to hunt... moreBassani describes a land beyond the city and surrounding countryside. It is a land that lives also in the water, so the active population is made up of people who work there or go there on purpose. This special land belongs to men who fish with boats and also with barrels to hunt.On a cold winter Sunday in 1947, the open horizons of the delta show a landscape in which the natural elements, with all of their charm, clash with the anguished feelings of Edgardo Limentani, the protagonist of The Heron. less

Bassani's six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six classic books, fully revised as a single volume by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron and The Smell of Hay... moreBassani's six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six classic books, fully revised as a single volume by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron and The Smell of Hay. These interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters, memorializing not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs.'Exquisite . . . from his boyhood Ferrara and the families he knew, Bassani has carved out a corner of Italy that rises above regionalism with fiction that can stand alongside the most lingering written in Europe to day' The New York Times less