The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Book

The short prologue to this book describes a visit by the narrator and his friends to the ancient burial site of the Etruscans at Cerveteri near Rome sometime in the 1950s. In the course of the visit, a discussion arises between one of the friends and his young daughter about why it might be less sad to visit a burial ground from long ago than to visit a present day one. The father claims that it is because we knew and loved the people who are buried in our modern graveyards, whereas the amount of time that has passed makes it as if the people buried in ancient sites never really lived at all, or as if they were always dead. But his young daughter is not convinced. For her the Etruscans deserve our sadness just as much as do our recent dead. Time does not make them less worthy of remembrance.

That prologue seems to underline Giorgio Bassani's intention for his Ferrara novels, of which this book is the third. In this episode I see a strengthening of his determination to preserve the memory of the community he belonged to while growing up in Ferrara in the 1930s, and which has been well dispersed by the time he was writing this book in the late 1950s. He wants to make sure that Time does not make it as if the community never existed, especially since many of its members, in contrast to the Etruscans with their well furnished tombs complete with food, utensils, mosaics, chairs and beds, never had any tomb at all.

The Finzi-Contini family at the centre of this story seem to live as royally as the Etruscans. Their house and gardens are exceptionally large and imposing, and they possess a large and imposing tomb in the Jewish graveyard in Ferrara. Their lives and their after-lives seem well taken care of. In this beautifully written narrative, Giorgio Bassani has ensured that this particular family, who lived as if already safely buried behind the high walls of their garden, are fully deserving of our remembrance. I doubt there is a reader who could ever forget them.

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For those who are interested in the parallels I've been finding between Bassani's Ferrara cycle and Marcel Proust's Recherche du Temps Perdu, let me say that there are even more here than in the second book, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles.
The narrator is the same as in that book, and he remains unnamed. In this episode he recounts his memories of the Finzi-Contini family, from when he first became aware of them as a young boy in the late 1920s until he left Ferrara at the outbreak of the war.
Like Marcel Proust's unnamed narrator's obsession with the Guermantes family, which began with a sighting in the church at Combray when he was a child, and which grew and grew with the passing years, Bassani's narrator first spots the Finzi-Contini family in the local synagogue. Each year during Passover, Rosh HaShannah and Hanukkah, he gets another sighting, and becomes more and more interested in this family he rarely sees elsewhere. He becomes particularly fascinated with the son and daughter of the house, Alberto and Micòl, who have private lessons and therefore don't attend the local school.

One day when he is a young teenager, he has a brief encounter with Micòl across the Finzi-Contini garden wall just as Proust's narrator does with Gilberte Swann through the garden railings of Tansonville. From that day onwards, his interest in the Finzi-Continis transforms into an interest in Micòl alone just as Proust's narrator becomes obsessed with Gilberte during his teenage years to the exclusion of all else. Both narrators have to wait a few years before they again encounter the object of their affection and the encounters happen in similar circumstances: an invitation to the loved one's home, for afternoon tea and conversation in the case of Gilberte, for afternoon tea and tennis, in the case of Micòl. Then, in both cases, another period of separation, during which they suffer jealous torment, before a later encounter takes place.
These parallels may not seem much to other readers but they strike me as significant, and I'll be on the lookout for more as I read on through the final books in the cycle