The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

"Of all the books that I have selected, maybe with the exception of Verga, this is the easiest to read as a novel and it’s the one that has the classic novel plot that will engage even the most ardent lovers of popular fiction. It’s a book about the Jewish community in the small town of Ferrara in northeastern Italy in the years immediately prior to World War II . This was Bassani’s own community, about which he wrote a great deal. It tells the story of a family, the Finzi-Contini, a rich family, and they have isolated themselves to a large extent in this very large villa outside the town. There’s a wife and husband and two children and they only come into the town to go to the synagogue or to do public exams at the school. All their other education is private. So they live in a world where they won’t contaminate themselves with anybody else and then when the race laws are introduced in Italy in 1938 they begin to open up to the rest of the Jewish community saying: “Now that you can no longer play tennis at the Ferrara tennis club, why don’t you come and play tennis in our garden?” So most of the book takes place in 1938 when the narrator of the book goes and plays tennis every day in the garden of the Finzi-Contini and falls in love with the daughter of the family, Micol. They have one of those unbelievably frustrating relationships where you constantly feel that they are about to have sex but they never do. And in that sense the book is not completely different from Pavese – of how much you want to really engage in life and risk being involved and how much you want to be closed and isolated in a separate world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the things that most interests me about this book is that it’s not really just about the Jews or about the Holocaust , it’s about a desire on the part of this family, which is typical of all Western bourgeois society, to possess the whole world in your house and garden and to control it all without having to really be exposed to the outside world. So in this garden they have every type of plant from all over the world. In their house they have every kind of book and every kind of painting. They eat every kind of food – they’re not strictly kosher Jewish in that sense at all. They try to control everything. They even have a separate telephone in every room. There’s a great bit in the book when Micol says, if you really want to control life and be independent what you need is your own separate phone line in your own room, which so much looks forward to the mobile phone and to the person on their own communicating with the rest of the world from the safety of their room. And the irony, of course, is that as the reader reads, they know right from the opening pages that these people are destined for the death camps – and that garden and that room, which seemed so safe, is actually just a space of denial because the world outside is changing. It’s very powerful. What’s interesting about the book is that clearly Bassani is criticising this family for their behaviour and for their desire to remain outside the world and believing that they could not be involved in the world, because other people are taking positions against the Fascists, against what’s happening, whereas they’ve just withdrawn. He’s doing that, but at the same time you can feel his immense attraction to their way of life, to how beautiful it is that they don’t actually get involved. It’s a lovely ambiguous book in that sense."

"This is one of the greatest books that I know. It is beautifully done. There is an anonymous narrator who is clearly based on Giorgio Bassani’s own experiences. Again, it is an oblique look at the fate of European Jews. The story is about a group of young Jews in Ferrara in north-eastern Italy, thrown together by the race laws which the Fascists passed just before the war. The central relationship is between the girl Micol Finzi-Contini and the narrator himself. Her family is extremely grand and very reserved. They have a very large house in a magnificent park. The title calls it the ‘garden’ of the Finzi- Continis but ‘park’ would do it more justice. During their childhood days the narrator couldn’t really aspire to knowing them but circumstances – the race laws – throw them together: excluded from the local tennis club because they are Jews, they start their own tennis group, meeting in the Finzi-Contini garden. Under these at first idyllic circumstances the narrator falls for Micol. It’s a heart-breaking relationship because it’s not entirely reciprocated; or at least you never know to what degree it is reciprocated by the enigmatic Micol. Ultimately the family does get swept away into the Holocaust, but this happens after the events narrated in the book. Bassani himself survived the war because he joined the resistance. One imagines that many of his friends disappeared the same way as the Finzi-Continis. Throughout the book you know what is going to happen but the family’s fate is never spelt out. Yes, and the relationship between him and Micol is extremely moving. And also his friendship with her father who is a very retiring academic. Again, the theme here is acceptance. The narrator is ultimately rejected by Micol and there is a personal forgiveness from him, I suppose, forgiveness in principle at least, although she is not there to receive it. Throughout the book he is trying to deal with the fact that she rejects him, but he also suspects that she might have had an affair with one of their friends."