The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - Hardcover

Bassani, Giorgio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567310990 ISBN 13: 9781567310993

Publisher: Fine Communications,US, 1996

Synopsis

A great commercial success when first published--and an Academy Award-winning film in 1970--Giorgio Bassani's wrenching story of Ferrara, Italy, and the aristocratic Finzi-Contini family during the dangerous days of the * regime has become a modern classic. As a middle-class *, the narrator of the novel has contact with the detached Alberto and Micol Finzi-Contini only when they come to school to sit for final exams, and at the synagogue during the major holy days. For the most part, the Finzi-Continis remain isolated from the rest of the town behind the walls of their elegant estate. When Mussolini issues the anti-Semitic edicts of 1938, the narrator is expelled from the tennis club, and it is then that he is invited to play in the private courts beyond the Finzi-Contini garden. As the nightmare of the Holocaust descends upon this tranquil world, all are forced from its serenity and insularity. Giorgio Bassani, who was imprisoned until the Allies liberated Italy, won worldwide acclaim and numerous prestigious prizes for his novels and poetry.

About this title

Review

Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists. "The Guardian"
Curiously haunting and poetic . . . Like Proust, a novelist to whom he is inevitably compared, Bassani is a specialist in decadence and nostalgia. "Christian Science Monitor"
Bassani looms large in the Italian literary scene . . . ["The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"] is an honest book, and tells with a kind of probing tenderness a true story of sensitive and vulnerable youth in a somber decade. "Saturday Review"
"The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is first and foremost a love story and on quite a different level from anything else Bassani wrote . . . Beneath every other theme and concern, and whether or not prompted by the political situation, the question [the novel] quite explicitly ask[s] is:
what does it mean to have lived? from the new Introduction by Tim Parks"

"Giorgio Bassani is one of the great witnesses of this century, and one of its great artists." -The Guardian

"Curiously haunting and poetic . . . Like Proust, a novelist to whom he is inevitably compared, Bassani is a specialist in decadence and nostalgia." -Christian Science Monitor

"Bassani looms large in the Italian literary scene . . . [The Garden of the Finzi-Continis] is an honest book, and tells with a kind of probing tenderness a true story of sensitive and vulnerable youth in a somber decade." -Saturday Review

"The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is first and foremost a love story and on quite a different level from anything else Bassani wrote . . . Beneath every other theme and concern, and whether or not prompted by the political situation, the question [the novel] quite explicitly ask[s] is:
what does it mean to have lived?" -from the new Introduction by Tim Parks

About the Author

Giorgio Bassani was born in 1916. From 1938 onwards he became involved in various anti-fascist activities for which he was imprisoned in 1943. His works include The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and Five Stories of Ferrara (Within the Walls), which won the Strega Prize. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was awarded the Viareggio Prize in 1962 and was made into a feature film.

William Weaver was an award-winning poet and translator. He died in 2013.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fine Communications,US
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1567310990
• ISBN 13: 9781567310993
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200