The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
SynopsisPlot
The Finzi-Continis are an aristocratic Jewish family who live an insular life behind the walls of their estate in the northern Italian city of Ferrera. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew, has been intrigued by the Finzi-Continis from boyhood and especially by the two children, Alberto and Micol. Not until he is twenty-two, in the autumn of 1938, is he invited to enter their private world, a place seemingly immune from the racial laws of Fascist Italy. Thirteen years after the war, he traces his intricate relationship with the beautiful Micol and shares the predicament of all the Ferrarese Jews on the eve of their destruction. Critically acclaimed and award-winning, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is an unforgettable, wrenching novel that re-creates a tragic era in history.
Story
About this book
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is set in Ferrara, a city in northern Italy, during the late 1930s. At its center is a wealthy Jewish family who live behind the high walls of their private estate, separated from the rest of the town. The narrator, a young middle-class Jewish man, has watched the family from a distance since childhood, drawn especially to the two Finzi-Contini children, Alberto and Micol. In the autumn of 1938, as Fascist Italy introduces racial laws restricting Jewish life, he is finally invited inside their grounds.
Within the garden, daily existence appears to continue undisturbed. Tennis is played, conversations unfold, and the outside world seems far away. The narrator's growing attachment to Micol becomes one of the novel's central threads, but the story is told from a distance of thirteen years, long after the war has ended. That gap between the sheltered present of the garden and the narrator's later knowledge of what followed gives the book its particular tension.
Giorgio Bassani published the novel in 1962. It was later adapted into a film that received an Academy Award. Bassani himself grew up in Ferrara, and much of his fiction returns to that city and its Jewish community during the Fascist period.
