Following last year’s successful group reading of Jean Giono’s Hill, Scott (of the wonderful blog Seraillon) & I are hosting another group reading later this spring. Keeping with the Mediterranean theme we have in no way consciously established, our choice this year is Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962).

The blurb on the flap of my Everyman Edition says:

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 an 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 Ferranese Jews, in this unforgettably wrenching portrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls.

Okay, so that last sentence is a bit rich (“unforgettably wrenching”–ugh!) but the book sounds intriguing nonetheless, especially in its narrative structure. (It actually sounds a bit like L. P. Hartley’s near-contemporary The Go-Between.)

Scott knows a lot about Italian literature, and I know something about Holocaust literature: between the two of us, I think we’ll have some helpful to context to offer. (Assuming that it even makes sense to call this a novel of the Holocaust–my sense is perhaps not quite, but it’s certainly a novel about the Fascist persecution of Europe’s Jews.) Beyond our own areas of interest, though, I’m excited to see what contexts and interpretations others will bring to the effort.

Scott & I will both be reading the William Weaver translation from 1977, though as Scott points out in his post there are two other translations available in English, including a recent one by the English poet Jamie McKendrick (2007) that I am curious about. (McKendrick seems to be translating a number of Bassani’s works.)

We’ll be posting our reviews the week of May 22. The book’s less than 250 pages. Won’t you join us?