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

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.

Es ist die Geschichte von Micól, dem geheimnisvollen Mädchen mit den blonden Haaren aus vornehmer jüdischer Familie, in die der Ich-Erzähler von Anfang an vergeblich verliebt ist. Die leidenschaftlich gern Tennis spielt, die alten Bäume im ummauerten Park der Eltern liebt und es nicht ertragen kann, wenn jemand sich gewöhnlich benimmt; die später, als Studentin, lieber flirtet als studiert, und die junge Männer, die am liebsten für sie sterben möchten, am Telephon zur Vernunft ermahnt.Erst als der Tennisclub wegen der Rassengesetze die jüdischen Mitglieder ausschließt, öffnet sich der Garten der Finzi-Contini für die jüdische Jugend Ferraras und wird zu ihrem Treffpunkt - bis zu einem Tag im Herbst 1943, an dem Micól mit ihrer ganzen Familie deportiert wird »und keiner weiß, ob sie ein Grab gefunden haben«.Giorgio Bassani hat ihnen in diesem Buch ein Denkmal gesetzt.