Another Literary Tour of Italy by Tim Parks

Author:Tim Parks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: calvino, critical, Dante, elena ferrante, Essays, Italian Literature, Italian ways, Literary, Non-fiction, Pirandello, primo levi, saviano, Tim Parks
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2024-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Novel of Ferrara

The Holocaust must be mentioned, but it will not be talked about. It must be mentioned because it is the single most conditioning fact in Giorgio Bassani’s life and in the life of the Jewish community in the northern Italian town where he grew up: in 1943, 183 of Ferrara’s four hundred or so Jews were rounded up and deported to Germany, whence but one returned. It will not be directly talked about because Bassani himself was not among the 183, and apparently had no inclination to describe the horror itself. “Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau and so on,” reads a line from one story, and leaves it at that.

Considered one of the finest Italian novelists of the twentieth century, Bassani wrote and published four novels and two collections of stories between 1937 and 1972, later editing and combining them into a huge composite work, The Novel of Ferrara (1974), now published for the first time in English as a single book, with a single translator, Jamie McKendrick. Reading it, we contemplate the people of Ferrara over some sixty years, Jews and gentiles, rich and poor, before and after the great convulsions of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Each story is self-contained, but with characters and events that return and call to each other, illuminate one another, so that reading the whole oeuvre together we have the powerful impression of having seen three generations consume their lives, or all too often be consumed by violence.

Despite its evident emotional and intellectual complexity, Bassani’s work is frequently reviewed as if his writing were primarily an analysis and denunciation of Fascism. We mix aesthetic appreciation with complacent political approval, and that is it. In reality, his fiction is by no means circumscribed by its focus on a particular historical moment or its dramatization of the predicament of Italian Jews in the 1930s. Nor can his vision be so easily aligned with straightforward liberalism as many commentators would have us believe. True, in his masterpiece, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – a novel about a wealthy Jewish family who choose to live in genteel seclusion behind the high walls of their villa, ignoring the rapidly rising tide of anti-Semitism in the community at large – the whole drama is anchored by the pathos, announced in the opening pages, that the Finzi-Continis will eventually be deported to the death camps. Yet the individual members of the family remain deeply enigmatic, and their choices open to question. Through them Bassani explores the relationship between fear and conformity, individually and collectively, what it means to be civilized and what role art might have in the matter. For readers today, with our own civilization looking increasingly precarious – and the urge to withdraw from it ever more enticing – these are pressing issues, hence the immediate allure of these stories. But great writers do not offer easy answers or uncomplicated sentiments.

Giorgio Bassani was born in 1916 to a moderately wealthy Jewish family in the small town of Ferrara, about thirty miles north-east of Bologna.

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