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Title: The Garden of Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani, William Weaver ISBN: 0-15-634570-6 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A beautiful Garden
Comment: We know so much about German Jews and the problems they faced with the Nazism, and so little on the Italian Jews in the same time, that Giorgio Bassani's 'The Garden of Finzi-Continis' stands as a remarkable thing. This is not the only reason to read and praise this novel. This book is filled with wonderful characters that make it a great work of fiction.
Set in an Italian small town called Ferrara, 'Garden...' follows a couple of years in the life of the narrator. Years after the events, he is forced to remember the whole story, and that's the beginning of the narrative's journey. We follow him from a small and naïve boy worried with school grades until when he is a grown-up in love with the Finzi-Contini girl and has his political sense developed.
Bassani has a wonderful prose. Many pages of the book are devoted to beautifully evocative descriptions of things like the house, the city, the garden. That is one of the things that make this book so magical.
Another one is its vivid characters. Everyone seems to be real people and not literary creations, and this is a great achievement for a writer. The narrator is the person who goes through the most drastic transformation. Throughout his story he learns the importance of his past and roots, and how they are place in contemporary history.
'The Garden of the Finzi-Contini' is one of those books that don't take too long to read, but take a very long period to be forgotten. And to some people it will never be forgotten.
Rating: 5
Summary: haunting love story
Comment: This is a love story, a story about growing up, a story about discovering one's three rich heritages (Italian and Jewish and literary). And it is a story about a boy becoming a writer.
There must be thousands such coming-of-age stories; thousands of stories about that first (and naturally unrequited) love; and, since most of the people who write these stories are authors there are even a few tales of how boys grow up to become writers.
And yet this tale is haunting. It grips the reader and never lets him go till the end and even long after. And that is because this is also a story about a murder.
The murder is barely mentioned. Oh, the narrator invokes it once or twice when for example he tells us that when he looked out at his family members during a Passover meal "most of whom, a few years later would be swallowed up by German crematory ovens" he found almost all of them terribly bland and bourgeois. He also mentions it at the beginning when he informs us that his first (unrequited) love, Micol, her father, her mother, and her Grandmother were all "deported to Germany in the autumn of '43". But that's not what this story is about.
This is not a story about concentration camps and the mechanized degradation there. This is a hauntingly, heart-breakingly beautiful story about a young man and a first love in a wondrous garden. A story that comes to an abrupt end because the children (the real flowers in the Garden of the Finzi-Continis) are made to pay the ultimate price because the Italians around them first resented that "the Jews were not enough like the others and then, having ascertained their almost total assimilation into their surroundings, [resented] the opposite: that they were just like the others."
It is, in the end (to paraphrase Amos Oz), about Jews who were not to be special and who were not to be banal; who were not to be.
Rating: 4
Summary: Fine Novel
Comment: Some readers will be familiar with this story because this novel was the basis for the beautiful and haunting film of the same title. Comparisons between the film and the book are inevitable. The basic story is identical in both. The narrator is a young, middle class Italian Jew in the provincial city of Ferrara. The events take place on the eve of WWII and are set against the background of the anti-semitic legislation and policies of the Italian fascist state. The book recounts the hopeless infatuation of the narrator with the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. This doomed and largely one-sided passion is presented subtly as an allegory of the fate of the Italian Jewish community. Not surprisingly, the book is considerably more detailed than the movie, more detached, and at times almost ironic in tone. The quality of writing is excellent, even in translation, and the characterization of pre-war Ferrara is evocative. The gradual constriction of the life of Italian Jews emerges slowly and indirectly, but with great power. The book also features an important subplot concerning the narrator's relationship with his father which is also presented with delicacy and real pathos. This is one of those books whose impact tends to linger well after you finish reading it.
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Title: Mussolini and the Origins of the Second World War, 1933-1940 by Robert Mallett ISBN: 0333748158 Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Fascism and the Right in Europe, 1919-1945: Seminar Sudies in History by Martin Blinkhorn ISBN: 058207021X Publisher: Longman Publishing Group Pub. Date: 14 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Path to the Spiders' Nests by Italo Calvino, Archibald Colquhoun, M. L. McLaughlin ISBN: 0060956585 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 30 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa ISBN: 0679731210 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism by Alexander Stille ISBN: 0312421532 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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