The Novel of Ferrara

by Giorgio Bassani, Jamie McKendrick (Translator), André Aciman (Foreword by)

Overview

Giorgio Bassani’s six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be.

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). The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani’s six classics, including The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, and The Memorial Plaque on Via Mazzini, fully revised by the author at the end of his life.

Set before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present nuanced and unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is exposed by an exploitative youth; the survivor of the Nazi death camps; the Jewish landowner, returned from exile, to find himself utterly displaced; the schoolteacher whose Communist idealism challenges a postwar generation.

Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, The Novel of Ferrara memorializes a city deeply informed by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. This seminal work seals Bassani’s indomitable reputation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393358605
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Pages:	768
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Giorgio Bassani  (1916–2000) was a renowned Italian author, editor, and critic who spent his youth in Ferrara. After brief imprisonment for anti-Fascist activities, he remained in Rome until his death.

Jamie McKendrick is a poet and translator born in Liverpool and living in Oxford, England.


André Aciman is the author of several novels including Call Me by Your Name, Find Me, and Harvard Square, the memoir Out of Egypt, and two books of essays. He is also the editor of The Proust Project. He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he directs the Writers’ Institute. Aciman lives with his wife and family in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

"As a mirror held up to Bassani’s generation, The Novel of Ferrara embodies a cautious optimism about how much this generation–and the ones to follow–might learn from its forebears’ mistakes. In its clear-eyed realism about the limits to such learning, as well as in the empathy with which it insists on pursuing it, Bassani’s Novel is a remarkable achievement."

Yale Review - Marta Figlerowicz

"[Bassani] could rightly place himself among the great Italian realist writers.… McKendrick is alert to Bassani’s cosmopolitanism and deep affinity for the English literary tradition, and doesn’t obscure the allusions Bassani certainly intended."

New York Review of Books - Laura Kolbe

"In a new translation by Jamie McKendrick, [The Novel of Ferrara] conveys a feeling of haze and depth, a sense of an old and inscrutable magic no less entrancing for often being dark."

Forward - Talya Zaks

"By connecting with [Giorgio] Bassani’s souls, and sometimes by even becoming one (or all) of them, McKendrick brings to life—anew—the miracle of translation."

John Florio Prize for Italian translation shortlist citation

"Bassani’s monumental elegy to the city’s doomed Jewish community restores the dignity that it is owed even as it compels us to relive the devastation endured."

Jewish Review of Books - Diane Cole

"A book of immense pathos, eloquence, elegiac splendor."

Harold Bloom

"Essential reading for anyone thirsting for an understanding of the complex density of Europe’s multicultural inheritance."

Fernanda Eberstadt

"Sitting beside the author watching a fire blaze—destructive, beautiful, and above all compelling—is largely how it feels reading Bassani’s work."

Harper’s - Tim Parks

Giorgio Bassani belongs to that extraordinary flowering of Italian Jewish writers, from Natalia Ginzburg to Primo Levi, who came of age under Fascism and thus grew up skeptical, allergic both to absolutism and pious rhetoric…Concentration camp inmates recounted their nightmares of returning home and finding the door locked to them or of discovering that their family members, like Geo Josz's fellow townsmen, were indifferent to their tales. Bassani, in these cultivated worldly-wise stories, so steeped in tenderness, rage and loss, is like someone returned from the underworld to bear witness…Bassani's history of the "little segregated universe" from which he was expelled is essential reading for anyone thirsting for an understanding of the complex density of Europe's multicultural inheritance, or wondering whether the world we know might once again be falling for the temptations of fascism.

The New York Times Book Review - Fernanda Eberstadt

"The book is stippled with shadow and light. Bassani pairs the sorrow of exclusion with the hope of joy and acceptance... The power of Bassani's writing is such that, for a moment, his transitory world seems beautifully everlasting."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"By connecting with Bassani's souls, and sometimes by even becoming one (or all) of them, McKendrick brings to life—anew—the miracle of translation."

John Florio Prize for Italian Translation shortlist citation

"The Novel of Ferrara can be compared to Joyce's Dubliner's or Balzac's La Comédie Humaine; but a more fitting parallel is the yizkor books that were  produced after the Holocaust to commemorate so many vanished Jewish towns."

Tablet Magazine - Adam Kirsch

"The fiction of this most dispassionate, most merciless and clear-eyed chronicler of the sequences and consequences of history—in stories almost always about the city's decisions about whom to include or exclude as its own—is, in the end, against all the odds, a declaration of love."

The Guardian - Ali Smith

"Sitting beside the author watching a fire blaze—destructive, beautiful, and above all compelling—is largely how it feels reading Bassani's work."

Harper's Magazine - Tim Parks

"The long overdue first appearance in English of Georgio Bassano's Il romanzo di Ferrara in a single volume, as the great Italian Jewish writer always intended, was very welcome. Translated by Jamie McKendrick as The Novel of Ferrara, it consists of four novels and two collections of stories, all suffused with Bassani's melancholia and sly wit."

Spectator - Peter Parker

"The best fiction writer of postwar Italy... The Novel of Ferrara has a sensuous and subtle economy, a fulness of dramatic life and depth of art that none of the other three [Calvino, Pasolini, Sciascia] comes near... He wrote about exclusion, desire, betrayal, memory."

Midnight in Sicily - Peter Robb