The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Today, dear friends, a new story, Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The book won the Viareggio prize in 1962 and was adapted by Vittorio de Sica in 1970 to make the academy award winning film of the same name. It should be noted that Bassani, an accomplished prose and poetry writer, initially worked on the screenplay with De Sica but the two clashed and Bassani left the project. However, the film credits him as the original story’s author.

Finzi-Continis was, of course, written in Italian, and I am working with a wonderful English translation by William Weaver that captures, I believe, a lot of the story’s poetic prose and Italian cadence.

Why read a book originally published over 60 years ago, you ask? Finzi-Continis is a story, a story about relationships (see below), set against the real process of the Italian fascists marginalizing, excluding and finally deporting Italians who were Jewish, a process the reader will recognize is being done today in America against refugees and their children.

So, is the story fiction? It is true that the author’s life shares many features with the fictional protagonist and narrator of the book. They are both Jewish men who lived through World War II; their fathers (who did not survive) were medical doctors who strove to be Italians first and Jews second. Both men, real and fictional, were in love with young women who played a lot of tennis, (Love/love). Bassani eventually married his inamorata, the protagonist, as we will see, did not, losing her to the Fascists. No less an authority than Tim Parks calls the story fictionalized autobiography. Elements from the author’s experience are transformed by placing them into a fully realized novel. Bassani is an accomplished writer who organizes his memories into a narrative structure.

The cover of the 1977 edition I have shows a beautiful image of a garden bathed in golden light. Of course, this refers to the title, and the title refers to a major theme of the book—attempting to live in an enchanted refuge while surrounded by danger. We will get to this later, I promise you. There are actually a number of references in the text to this quality of light. Here’s one:

“For ten or twelve days the perfect weather lasted, held in that kind of magic suspension, of sweetly glassy and luminous immobility peculiar to certain autumns of ours. It was hot in the garden, almost like summertime…the light; that last light invited you to insist, to continue volleying (they’re playing tennis) no matter if the play was almost blind. The day was not ended, it was worth lingering a little longer.”

For those of us who have seen the film version, this golden light is captured beautifully, and it probably should be noted that in a story about a young man’s obsession with a young girl, the girl’s hair is constantly described in shades of golden blond.

Indeed, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is, unlike Bassani’s other stories, about love, focusing on a decade long flirtation/attraction between the unnamed narrator and Micol Finzi-Contini, whom the narrator first meets when she is thirteen. He doesn’t see her during the last three years of her life and learns that she, along with her parents and grandmother and the narrator’s father, perished in a German concentration camp.

Let’s stop there today, best beloved.

Till next time.

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