Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Part 3 of The Novel of Ferrara. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick. Norton, 2018. First published in Italian 1962
In 2017 Dorian at his Eiger Mönch and Jungfrau blog co-hosted a readalong of this, the most famous novel in the Ferrara series by Italian author Giorgio Bassani – link to his main post HERE. If you follow the links to other bloggers who contributed you’ll find plenty of stimulating and insightful discussion.
Some of the points raised were about matters that had occurred to me as I was reading. There’s more than a whiff of Alain-Fournier’s beautiful, haunting novel Le Grand Meaulnes (1913). Like The Garden of the Finzi-Continis it deals with a young man’s love for a beautiful woman who lives in a big house in a huge estate that takes on an Edenic quality for him.
The unnamed narrator (as in the previous works in this five-part Ferrara sequence) is clearly based on Bassani, looking back on this tumultuous period of his life from several decades later. But unlike Meaulnes’ Yvonne, Micòl Finzi-Contini – the adored object of his love – is less inclined to return it. His repeated attempts to evoke a passionate response in her become increasingly, somewhat worryingly, forceful.
We learn the terrible fate of the wealthy Jewish Finzi-Contini family at the very start of the narrative. As in the previous works in this sequence of stories, the main action takes place in the late 1930s, when the fascist party that had been in power in Italy for nearly two decades became ever more viciously anti-Semitic; the racial laws of 1938 cause the narrator and his Jewish friends to be barred from any public clubs (among other prohibitions). Because they had all been keen members of the city’s tennis club, Micòl and her brother Alberto invite the narrator and other friends to play on their family’s private court in the huge grounds of their mansion just inside the Ferrara city walls.
It’s a bit clunky to keep calling him ‘the narrator’, so I’ll take the liberty, as de Sica did in his dreamy 1970 film of the novel, of calling him Giorgio.
Giorgio and Micòl had a crush on each other when they were children, peeping at each other in the synagogue their families attended. Then the Finzi-Contini family stepped up their already rather separate status in the community, and started worshiping in their own, newly renovated ‘Spanish’ synagogue (their aloofness from the rest of the community, including the Jewish one, is highlighted by this sectarian distinction; Giorgio’s family worship in the ‘Italian’ School synagogue). These are the kinds of details that add to the elusive, almost mystical quality with which Giorgio presents them (although in many ways they’re also seen to be perfectly normal).
As in the previous stories, we hear how, in the 20s, 90 per cent of the Jewish people in the city joined the Fascist party (including Giorgio’s father). When Giorgio and Micòl are 13 (in 1929) she teases him about a poor exam result, flirting with him over the high garden wall (he’s too timid to scale it as she’d suggested); he assumes she sees him as of lower social status, an ‘assimilated’ Jewish family – unlike hers, so aristocratic and set apart, physically and socially. This self-flagellating tendency of his, a sense of unworthiness and inability to seize opportunities for happiness, is something that becomes more prominent as the novel progresses – and in the next novel, Behind the Door.
He hardly sees her for another ten years, when the tennis matches start in an idyllic late summer. He’s upset when Micòl leaves to study in Venice, but finds solace in being invited by her father to make use of his extensive library to work on his own thesis. He becomes a regular visitor and dinner guest, befriended by Alberto and his socialist friend from Milan – heated political discussions ensue as the Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists become ever more belligerent and war looms.
But grim consequences of the racial laws keep cropping up to counterpoint these scenes: Giorgio is thrown out of the public library where he used to study; a Jewish professor is sacked from the university. There’s a strangely oblique reference, glancing forward to 1943, when Giorgio mentions his imprisonment for activity with the anti-fascist resistance. This is not the kind of novel for such external things to be foregrounded; it’s more to do with Giorgio’s inner turmoil and confusion in the face of Micòl’s rejection of his advances.
There are references to some of the objects owned by Micòl’s family: an ageing, dilapidated coach; a rotting canoe she and her brother had used as children. She’s scornful of their coachman/manservant’s proud attempts to restore such things; her conclusion darkly foreshadows her own fate and that of her family:
‘Even things, they have to die, my friend [she tells Giorgio]. And so, if even they have to die, it’s just as well to let them go. Above all, there’s far more style in that, wouldn’t you say?’
Characters from previous stories in the sequence appear: Clelia Trotti, the socialist teacher who was the subject of the fourth story in Within the Walls; Dr Fadigati, from The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles. Figures from Ferrara’s history, especially that of the d’Este family (which ruled from the 13th to late 16th centuries) abound – one interesting example is Lucrezia Borgia, whose third marriage was to Alfonso I, Duke of Ferrara in 1502. She died and was buried in the city in 1519. Micòl jokes that one of the ancient trees in their park might well have been planted by this infamous figure.
Btw, one of Alfonso I’s successors, Alfonso II, was Duke of Ferrara 1559-1597; he’s the speaker of Browning’s well-known dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’. The poem hints that he’s setting up his ‘next’ duchess, after the death of his last one (Lucrezia de’Medici), who’d been just 13 when her arranged marriage to him took place in 1558; she died three years later, and rumours circulated that he’d had her poisoned because he was jealous of her relationship with the artist commissioned to paint her portrait.
These and other snippets of Ferrara’s history are unobtrusively placed and enrich the narratives in The Novel of Ferrara – placenames, etc. recall such luminaries of the city as Ariosto (author of the 16C epic Orlando Furioso), who’s buried in the city, where his patron had been another member of the d’Este family. Prominent streets are named after d’Este nobles, especially Ercole I (1431-1505), who was a key promoter of culture in the city, and made it an artistic hub. The Finzi-Contini estate’s adjacency to such a street and the city walls heightens the sense of their high social status – something that adds portentously to Giorgio’s tormented sense of unworthiness.