The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Everyman’s Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)

书籍介绍(英文)

Giorgio Bassani’s masterwork has Vittorio de Sica’s 1971 film adaptation to thank for its dual success and obscurity. Not enough people know that this tale of a middle-class Jewish youth’s obsession with the far more aristocratic Micol Finzi-Contini stems from a novel, not a novelization. Bassani’s doom- and tomb-ridden examination of one-sided love is far more complex--about individuals’ inability to contend with personal and political annihilation. Events call for heroism, yet it seems "downright absurd that now, all of a sudden, exceptional behavior was demanded of us." The narrator writes in retrospect, 13 years after World War II’s end, and reveals the Finzi-Continis’ 1943 deportation to Germany right from the start: "Who could say if they found any sort of burial at all?"

As Fascist racial laws go from strength to strength, the family, which had long isolated itself from the other inhabitants of Ferrara, opens its walled grounds and tennis court to other young Jews and even returns to the local temple. Unfortunately, the situation encourages the narrator’s dream that Micol will return his love, and she is forced into cruel honesty. "She looked into my eyes, and her gaze entered me, straight, sure, hard: with the limpid inexorability of a sword."

The author has re-created a tragic era in which even nobility could not outrun events, let alone admit they needed to. (For a nonfiction account of the fates of five Italian Jewish families under fascism, see Alexander Stille’s Benevolence and Betrayal.) Bassani’s elision of historical and personal agony is furthermore superbly translated by William Weaver. All is foretold in the novel’s Manzonian epigraph, "The heart, to be sure, always has something to say about what is to come, to him who heeds it. But what does the heart know? Only a little of what has already happened."

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Giorgio Bassani’s acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature.
Made into an Academy Award—winning film in 1970, The Garden of the Finzi—Continis is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewar Italy. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, has long been fascinated from afar by the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish family, and especially by their daughter Micol. But it is not until 1938 that he is invited behind the walls of their lavish estate, as local Jews begin to gather there to avoid the racial laws of the Fascists, and the garden of the Finzi-Continis becomes an idyllic sanctuary in an increasingly brutal world. Years after the war, the narrator returns in memory to his doomed relationship with the lovely Micol, and to the predicament that faced all the Ferrarese Jews, in this unforgettably wrenching portrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls.


乔治巴萨尼的杰作已经维托里奥德西卡的1971年电影改编的，感谢它的双成功，默默无闻。没有足够多的人知道这个故事的中间级的犹太青年的痴迷与更贵族米科尔Finzi -蒂尼源于小说，而不是一个的小说。巴萨尼的厄运和墓，一个充满审查片面爱情是复杂得多-关于个人无法抗衡的个人和政治毁灭。活动要求英雄主义，但它似乎是“彻头彻尾的荒唐，现在，突然之间，所有的异常行为是我们的要求。”叙述者写道：回想起来，13年之后，第二次世界大战的结束，揭示了Finzi - Continis'驱逐从1943年开始对德国的权利：“谁能够说，如果他们发现任何类型的墓葬呢？”

由于法西斯种族法的壮大去，家庭，曾长期脱离费拉拉其他居民本身，它的围墙开放的理由和网球场的其他年轻的犹太人，甚至返回到当地的寺庙。不幸的是，情况鼓励叙述者的梦想，米科尔将返回他的爱，她是被迫进入残酷的诚实。 “她看着我的眼睛，她的目光进入我，直，当然，硬与剑的清澈的必然性：。”

提交人重新创建一个悲惨的时代，甚至贵族不可能逃脱事件，更不用说承认他们需要。 （有关的5名意大利法西斯主义犹太家庭命运的纪实情况，见亚历山大寂静的仁慈和背叛。）巴萨尼的历史和个人的痛苦，省略是由威廉还寄望翻译