Volume 20, Number 18 · November 15, 1973
Warped Innocence
By Richard Ellmann
Behind the Door
by Giorgio Bassani
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 160 pp., $5.95
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
by Giorgio Bassani
Ballantine, 246 pp., $1.25 (paper)
Five Stories of Ferrara
by Giorgio Bassani
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 203 pp., $5.95
The Heron
by Giorgio Bassani
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 179 pp., $5.95
Behind the Door, the newest novel by one of the ablest of recent Italian novelists, corrects some possible misconceptions of his talent. Giorgio Bassani's best-known work, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, aspired to portray an aristocratic Jewish family in Ferrara during the years before 1943, when its members were deported to extermination camps in Germany. It offered a historical chronicle redolent of the coming destruction, in which the stages of fascist persecution were clearly marked: first the expulsion from the tennis club, then from the fascist party, then academic anti-Semitism, then more and more direct insult. These events lent the book an ominousness sweetened by an elegiac quality, for the narrator, his own family undistinguished, had somehow survived, and after the war could look back upon the Finzi-Continis with a desire to preserve at least his memories from the general destruction.
Review, 1091 words
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