Building A Story

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been looking at The Garden of the Finzi-Continis through the lens of content and meaning, pondering the nature of the relationship between the novel’s unnamed narrator and Micol Finzi-Contini. Today, let’s consider structure.

Ahh! Structure.

Bassani uses a common framing technique to present the story. I quoted its beginning in the Prologue two weeks ago. I’m going to do it again: “For many years I wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis—about Micol and Alberto, about Professor Ermano and Signora Olga…” So far, this is ambiguous. It could mean the narrator wanted to write about people who are still alive, or it could be that they’re dead. The narrator, writing in first-person, simple past tense, continues to describe, in this Prologue, going on a Sunday excursion in the year 1957 with some friends who have a young daughter. They go to a group of Etruscan tombs outside of Ferrara. Tellingly, the daughter asks her father, “Tell me, Papa, who do you think were more ancient, the Etruscans or the Jews?” The father laughs and replies: “Ask that gentleman back there,” indicating the narrator who is in the car’s back seat.  

This suggests that the narrator is Jewish, that the family with the daughter is not, and it introduces an important theme in the book, that Italian society is constructed from many ethno-religious groups, who co-exist. It also picks out another theme of ancient peoples leaving behind artifacts as records of their existence.

Then the group visits the tombs, which reminds the narrator of the nearby Finzi-Contini tomb, mostly empty. At the end of the Prologue, the narrator thinks of Micol and her parents who were deported to and murdered in a German concentration camp. “Who could say,” he concludes, “ if they found any sort of burial at all?”

This establishes the tragedy of the story but also tells us the fate of the book’s central character; straight off, the reader knows that Micol dies and that the narrator wants to write the book about her. It eliminates the pesky question which bedevils many a lessor book: Will the narrator and Micol get together or won’t they?  The reader knows before the story begins that Micol doesn’t survive WWII. The reader will read the whole novel knowing that Micol doesn’t survive. There may be tension about what sort of relationship she and the narrator have but it is clear that the relationship ends (actually, it doesn’t end because the narrator, who does survive—the reader knows that too—continues to think about her after her death).

This is a huge issue, and I want to clarify. From the beginning, the reader knows that the story is about a narrator looking back at people who have died. As things progress, and as I have been discussing, the story centers on the narrator’s feelings looking back on his relationship with one of these deceased, Micol. Because the reader knows she is dead, the whole story must be about understanding this loss and not whether or not the couple lived “happily ever after.” The central dramatic question becomes, not will they or won’t they get together, but how did the events in the story happen?

If the “will they or won’t they” question were used, it would imply that the author, Bassani, knows the answer and is perhaps rather condescendingly telling the reader a story he already knows the answer to and suspending the “news” till the end. The question of “how” is more respectful to the reader; it includes she/he in an investigation of how, that pushes forward to a known ending.

Timewise, the story begins in 1957, then goes back to the 1920s, I believe, and moves ahead to 1939, and ultimately back to 1957. There is mention made, midway, that the narrator was imprisoned in 1943, but, again, because of the beginning, we know he survived this ordeal and was writing in a present time of 1957. The story ends with an Epilogue that briefly describes how Micol and her family were arrested and deported because of being Jewish and killed by the Nazis. In many ways, the whole book is a tribute, a tomb, if you will, to her.

A different approach would be to start the story without the Prologue, just have the story of how the narrator and Micol met and developed their friendship, building to a climax where Micol and the narrator “break up” and then an afterword that says that she died.

A different sort of story, less satisfying, I think. The knowledge that Micol eventually dies provides much depth and tragedy, an intensity that would be missing otherwise.

Till next time.

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