Among the masters of twentieth-century literature, Giorgio Bassani and
his Northern Italian hometown of Ferrara "are as inseparable as James
Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste" (from the Introduction).
Now published in English for the first time as the unified masterwork
Bassani intended, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani's six
classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life: Within
the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, The Heron, and The Smell of Hay.
Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after
the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded
world of unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose
homosexuality is tolerated until he is humiliatingly exposed by an
exploitative youth; a survivor of the Nazi death camps whose neighbors'
celebration of his return gradually turns to ostracism; a young man
discovering the ugly, treacherous price that people will pay for a sense
of belonging; the Jewish aristocrat whose social position has been
erased; the indomitable schoolteacher, Celia Trotti, whose Communist
idealism disturbs and challenges a postwar generation.
The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but
the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected
by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. Suffused with new
life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, this seminal
work seals Bassani's reputation as "a quietly insistent chronicler of
our age's various menaces to liberty" (Jonathan Keates).
