This is a long collection of short novels about a town in between Bologna and Venice in northeast Italy circulating the long years of the wars, and especially in the lifetime of the novelist Giorgio Bassani, who lived from 1916-2000. Andre Aciman tells us in the introduction to the collection that the second world war created a kind of rift in Italian society, and moreover in Italian literature between those who saw the future as a place to moved toward and understand and an attempt to recreate or reestablish the past that the second war disrupted. This tension both within society, and within individuals made for a kind of emotional displacement. Writers like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa who wrote The Leopard seemed to be stuck in the past, while writers like Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were moving toward the future. Some writers like Bassani here, but also Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, felt the need to try to explain and account for this break in history and life. These novels often play in that discomfort and try to show that emotional breakage within the people and within the walls of the city here.
Within the Walls
“Turning back to the distant years of her youth, always, for as she lived, Lida Mantovani remembered the birth emotion, and especially the days just before it. Whenever she thought about it, she was deeply moved.”
This first book in the collection is either an interrelated series of short stories or short novellas, or a contiguous novel. But regardless the effect is to be “Within the walls” of the city, walking around, and meeting various of the people in the city and learning their stories. The stories tend to circulate around themes of alienation. The first involves a woman whose lover leaves her in a lurch, turning her into a kind of local figure of sympathy, but also disgust. Another involves a fraught would-be marriage in which two people from different social classes find that their positions are much harder to bypass than they thought. In another, a returned antifascist finds that his wartime pursuits don’t automatically translate to peacetime fame when it turns out that a lot of the same fascists he was fighting are just treated like regular people now. And the final story, a wartime massacre is litigated in the peace, and the thin borders between war and peace, especially in a country like Italy, that has had such violent upheavals in central government for such short a time as a country.
The middle story becomes the most poignant and well-rendered. The only Jew to survive the concentration camps returns to the town. He had been turned into the Nazis along with more than a hundred others, and he’s the only one left. And now he’s back. His presence is both confusions and discomfiting. For one thing, and people can’t quite understand this part, he’s gained a lot of weight. For another, his very presence, which was already a bit to periphery (being a Jew and all) is now quite inconvenient as the prevailing attitude in the town is one of “moving on” from the war. But here he is, with his memories, his body, and his serial number tattoo. It’s only when he confronts a fascist count in the street, slapping him “without provocation” that the town finally has the pre-text to shun him as they seemed to want to all along. It’s almost with relief that he committed an act that they could use against him.
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Original review:
This is a 1956 novel by the Italian writer Giorgio Bassani. It’s part of a six novel series called “The Novel of Ferrara” and contains the much more famous novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which became a well-known film. I will review that novel later on.
This novel splits its time among several different tangentially connected stories. The effect is of walking through the small city, being told about various landmarks–some official and some unofficial–and then given the stories behind them. In some cases, these landmarks are the literal plaques and markers relating history around town, and in other cases they are the landmarks of history, which is contained in the memories of the surviving city dwellers. It’s not a small city (about 130,000 now) and so there were plenty of survivors.
The city, like a lot of Italian cities was one seat of fascist power from 1923-1943, from the rise of Mussolini until the fall of Italy to the allied forces and the put down of the regime. The stories float around this wide array of time–there’s a love affair between two ill-suited people, there’s the story of a supporter of fascism, there’s various account of an event in 1943 where 180 Jews were killed in the town, in part because they had been outed and called up, but also in part as a show of “good faith” to the Nazis.
The spends much of its short length focusing on the markers of memory, and then the erasure of the history not necessarily by the conscious decisions of bad actors, but of the sweeps of time and the desire to live. I don’t know where the series goes from here, but I am already thinking a lot on the question of “What do you do after?” and “Can you begin again?”
The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles
“Time has begun to thin them out, and yet it would be wrong to claim that only a few people in Ferra still remember Dr. Fadigati. Oh yes, Athos Fadigati–they would recall–the ENT specialist who had a clinic and his own house in Via Gorgadello, a short walk from Piazza delle Erbe, and who ended up so badly, poor man, so tragically.”
This second novel in the series involves the above-mentioned doctor increasingly becoming a pariah in the town, a common enough theme. His status as a pariah comes in the form of his being an older gay man who has the temerity to not complete hide this from everyone else. Like a lot of novels about conformity, here standing out is the real issue, but even that is survivable if you don’t also try to assert yourself in any kind of way. The doctor here barely does this, but it’s still too much.
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Original Review:
“Like Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Fadigati had two lives. But who doesn’t?”
This is a short novel told by a young Italian Jew in between the wars. In this book, he profiles his friendship with a local doctor, well know in the town for being a caring, compassionate, intellectual, and interesting man. He’s also well-known for being gay. The novel picks up a lot from where the previous Bassani novel leaves off, a wide-spread rendering of the city in the time period from about 1919-1960 as told through the eyes of surviving Jewish townsfolk who had to deal with becoming the pariah of the local Fascistic order, and how a figure like Doctor Fadigati became a kind of martyr.
This is a very sad story because of the sense of betrayal at the heart of it, but also it’s a reminder of the sheer luck and fortune involved in surviving anything so horrible as this. In addition, it’s horrifying because of how cheap peace, order, civility, and citizenship really is.
“Nothing so excited an indiscreet interest among the small circle of respectable society as that rightful impulse to keep the private and the public separate in one’s life. So what on earth did Athos Fadigati get up to after the nurse had shut the glass door behind the last patient? The far from evident or at least hardly normal use that the doctor made of his evenings added to the curiosity that surrounded his person. Oh yes, in Fadigati there was a hint of something hard to fathom. But even this, in him, had an appeal, was an attraction.
Everyone knew how he spent his mornings, so no one had anything to say about them.”
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“For many years I have wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis–about Micol and Alberto, Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga–and about the many others who lived at, or like me frequented, the house in Corso Ercole I d’Este, Ferrara, just before the last war broke out. But the impulse, the prompt, really do so only occurred for me a year ago, one April Sunday in 1957.”
Generally, this novel is seen as the heart and masterpiece of this collection, and it’s by far the most famous compared to the rest of them. I am also writing this review without yet having finished the final three, and so far this is the fullest and richest of the novels in the collection. It was also filmed and won many awards including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
The novel begins with a prologue, and like a lot of prologues, you wonder how essential this is to the whole of the novel. But in the prologue, the author tells us about a recent trip to a set of ruins, and how in looking at some ancient tombs a young child in the party asks why no one seems sad. It’s explained that when people die fresher in our memories, they seem more real and their deaths are sadder because of their approximation to us. And the child responds that she disagrees, and that older graves like this one feel more real because of how long the person has been dead, and how much sadder it feels because of a sense of touching on the eternity of death.
Regardless, this leads us to the beginning of the novel, in which our narrator (who is mostly in the persona of the author as has been true about all the other novels so far) tells us about a family tomb in the town of Ferrara, which houses several generations of the Finzi-Continis, a local wealthy Jewish family, but not the recent dead, who died in concentration camps, where he wonders whether they have graves at all.
The novel then moves back several decades to when our narrator is a boy, and his first meetings with the family. The narrator is also Jewish, and this is part of the connection he shares with the family, there not being a lot of Jews in town, but their wealth and status acts as a kind of barrier. Because of his ability in school, he does end up crossing paths with the brother and sister (the children in the family) when they come to school to take their local exams and all three of them score well, putting them in the same space.
Years later they meet again. There’s a moment when the girl, Micol, invites the narrator past the walls of her estate, but he’s too scared and doesn’t. But the connections of days and days of conversation never leave him.
Finally, once our narrator has graduated university and begun his career as a literature scholar and he meets the girl again, becoming friends with her, and falling a little bit in love with her. He becomes more embroiled in her family, befriending the brother as well, and earning the regard of their father. He also quarrels with other young people. It’s a scene of youth and vigor and impending doom, as the late 1930s racial laws are about to come into effect turning their exclusive company into excluded company.
It seems at first like the narrator is experiencing a fledgling romance, but rather it’s one-sided, and like a lot of young men, he doesn’t take this well, and begins to resent Micol, who just wants to be friends with him. His persistence, egged on by the feeling of being aggrieved by her rejection causes him to pursue her with both additional vigor, and more cruel resentment, always looking for an excuse to try to kiss her and force the issue of her rejection. One of his last memories of her is yet another moment of having backed her into a corner and saying some casual cruelty to her. Soon thereafter all the Jews in town are sent to concentration camps, and we are with our narrator years later as he is one of the only survivors. I am not spoiling anything here, as he tells us in the very first paragraph of the novel who will live and who will die in this novel. If we’ve forgotten by now as the mere names in the beginning have now been breathed with life, that’s on us.
Behind the Door
“I’ve been unhappy many times in my life, as a child, as a boy, as a man; many times, if I think about, I’ve touched what what are called the depths of despair. And yet I can recall few periods blacker for me than the months from October 1929 to June 1930, when I had just started the ginnasio supreriore.”
Although perhaps not the very best of the novels I think I like this one the most. In the early parts of The Gardens of the Finzi-Contini, our narrator ends up blowing off studying for his calculus exams, focusing instead on his Latin and Italian exams and believes that he will be able to coast enough for a passing score, if not a very good one. Well, he entirely fails it, and has to schedule to retake the class in the fall. In that novel, we don’t actually get the story, and here, if this is the same narrator (or perhaps only the same situation), our narrator finds himself retaking that class. However, he cannot be a part time student and ends up taking a full course. This puts him in cram classes with several other boys from around town. When he walks into class the first day, he chooses a seat in the middle of the class, and as sometimes happens this puts him in proximity of someone who will have great influence over him, at least for the time being. He has inadvertently placed himself next to the smartest boy in the class, Catolica. They become friends and slight rivals. But this friendship is not the only thing going on in the novel. The circle becomes larger, and our narrator ends up running in a wider circle, eventually leading to the showdown that the title of the novel suggests. One other boy, Luigi, is also friends with our narrator, but he’s more thuggish in his ways, and more vulgar especially. One scene in the novel involves them changing for swimming and Luigi ends up standing naked for a longer time than necessary, clearly a set up for the narrator to see his penis, which horrifies him as it’s quite large. This breakdown in the code of boys (however typical a scene is for many boys’ lives) slightly turns him away from Luigi, but also he feels like he can’t get rid of him. When Catolica and the other boys try to cut out Luigi, unrelated to that event, our narrator defends him, only to be told that Luigi mocks him and cruelly gossips about him constantly. They convince him to hide behind one of the doors in the house when Luigi is around and he will hear it himself. He does so, and while he hears Luigi’s cruelty, he also hears the solemn pity of the other boys, and he feels equally as repulsed by them as Luigi. But school years don’t last and the aftermath here is short.
The Heron
“Not instantly, but resurfacing with something a struggle from the bottomless pit of unconsciousness, Edgardo Limentani thrust out his arm in the direction of the bedside table.”
A man goes on a hunting trip and in killing a red heron begins to envy the now dead bird and slowly loses his will to live. But it’s unclear exactly what he will choose for himself.
The Smell of Hay
“Once upon a time, when I was a boy, there lived in Ferrara a Jewish Signorina who was not ugly, nor poor, nor stupid, nor too old–not especially desirable, if truth be told, but not in the least deserving to be scorned–for whom, however strange it may seem, her family had not managed to find a husband. Strange? Well, yes.”
This is two fables, as the beginning of the book tells us. The first fables begins when a spinster (well, like 30) in the Ferrara eyes a newly arrived Jewish Russian immigrant and decides she will find a way to have a baby with him. They do, and now older this boy is trying himself to get with a girl who doesn’t seem too much to want to be with him, but he’s persistent and they end up together. Part of the fable here is that the intense feeling he has that the coming war and the new racial exclusion laws has drastically shortened both of their lives, that he is so adamant to succeed. He certainly didn’t expect that they could get married and stay together indefinitely. We also return to some of the other stories and characters from earlier of the novels, which speaks to the question I asked myself earlier in my reading about whether or not you could skip around. You can, but I don’t think you should.
