Bücher von Giorgio Bassani

First published in 1982, In rima e senza brought together all the poetry Giorgio Bassani wished to preserve. The Collected Poems offers anglophone readers for the first time the opportunity to experience his full poetic range. Not only do Bassani's early poems foreshadow key themes of the fiction, such as his classic The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, but his later free verse scrutinizes with a startling directness the life and work of this major Italian writer."Everything is connected in Giorgio Bassani's work, everything articulated through the first verses in Poor Lovers' Stories to the last in Epitaph and In Great Secret and through his entire lyrical and narrative production. And yet, there are twists, major fractures, starting with perhaps the most critical and poignant of all, the author's last production in verse, in which Bassani most likely reaches the apex of his artistic expression [...] Welcome back to life, dear Father, welcome back among us!"-Paola Bassani, from the Foreword

Pochi romanzi italiani del Novecento sono entrati così profondamente nel cuore dei lettori come "Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini", un libro che è riuscito a unire emozioni private e storia pubblica, convogliandole verso un assoluto coinvolgimento narrativo. Un narratore senza nome ci guida fra i suoi ricordi d'infanzia, nei suoi primi incontri con i figli dei Finzi-Contini, Alberto e Micòl, suoi coetanei resi irraggiungibili da un profondo divario sociale. Ma le leggi razziali, che calano sull'Italia come un nubifragio improvviso, avvicinano i tre giovani rendendo i loro incontri, col crescere dell'età, sempre più frequenti. Teatro di questi incontri, spesso e volentieri, è il vasto, magnifico giardino di casa Finzi-Contini, un luogo che si imbeve di sogni, attese e delusioni. Il protagonista, giorno dopo giorno, si trova sempre più coinvolto in un sentimento di tenero, contrastato amore per Micòl. Ma ormai la storia sta precipitando e un destino infausto sembra aprirsi come un baratro sotto i piedi della famiglia Finzi-Contini.

The haunting, classic novel of Fascist Italy on the brink of World War II, made into an Academy Award-winning film 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.