The Novel of Ferrara

Suffused with new life by poet Jamie McKendrick, “undoubtedly Bassani’s finest translator yet” (Times Literary Supplement), this seminal work seals Italian novelist Giorgio Bassani’s reputation as “a quietly insistent chronicler of our age’s various menaces to liberty” (Guardian).Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after World War II, The Novel of Ferrara includes Within the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Behind the Door, TheHeron, and The Smell of Hay. These interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is tolerated until he is humiliatingly exposed by a scandal; a survivor of the Nazi death camps whose neighbors’ celebration of his return gradually turns to ostracism; a man who has never recovered from the wounds inflicted in youth by a treacherous friend. Above all, the city itself assumes a character and a voice, deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs.