Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Giorgio Bassani

Novel of Ferrars by Giorgio Bassani

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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 […]

It was 1919, just after the other war.

The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles by Giorgio Bassani

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“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 […]

At first you might not be aware of it.

Within the Walls by Giorgio Bassani

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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 […]



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