THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS

by Giorgio Bassani. translated by Jamie McKendrick

At the beginning of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis we know what will happen. A visit to an Etruscan tomb reminds the middle-aged narrator of his youth. He recalls the grandiose tomb of the Finzi-Continis. Only one of the family he knew 20 years ago would be buried there.

The rest – mother, father, grandmother and the blonde daughter Micol – were deported to Germany in the 1943 “and no one knows whether they have any grave at all”. The narrator, like Bassani (born 1916) himself, grows up in a small Jewish community in Ferrara and begins his story in 1929. His exams go badly, and fleeing on his bicycle, he flings himself under a tree on the ramparts – “one of those old trees . . . which, a dozen years later, in the frozen winter of Stalingrad, would be sacrificed for firewood”. A voice calls him, and Micol invites him into the hidden garden of the Finzi-Continis. But they are interrupted and he doesn’t make it.

Aloof and aristocratic, the Finzi-Contini family does not mix with the town. It is not until October 1938, after the Racial Laws have been passed (the laws that forced Bassani, above, to publish his early work under a pseudonym), that Alberto, Micol’s brother, invites him to play tennis. The local club had asked certain members to resign. The Finzi-Contini garden is their new venue.

The young people play tennis and drink raspberry cordial. Micol completes her degree but is not awarded cum laude because she is Jewish. Her father lets the narrator use his library. He is falling in love with Micol but she holds him at a distance.

Bassani’s epigraph is from Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi: “Of course, for whoever pays heed to it, the heart always has something to say about what’s to come.” Micol seems to know she has no future. She insists on “le vièrge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”, but the lover she never had creates a fitting monument from memory and loss.

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