Many attempts have been made to express the loss that the Holocaust caused, the huge gaping hole left across Europe by the millions of lives it claimed. This classic Italian novel is a melancholy, poetic portrayal of the Jewish community, leading up to its extinction, in the city of Ferrara. It's all the more heart-rending because it barely touches on the impending doom, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.
My edition of the book included an introduction that compared the book to Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," and like that novel, here, too, an unassuming narrator from a humble background finds himself mesmerized by an elite family, especially one of its members. And that's a fair comparison. But in "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," the inevitable, omitted final chapter looms over the book like a sword of Damocles.
In the novel, the unnamed narrator, who presumably lives in the Jewish ghetto in the south of the city, befriends the Finzi-Continis, a well-to-do, intellectual family living in the richer, greener north. When Mussolini's oppressive antisemitic laws forbid Jews from playing at the local tennis club, the Finzi-Continis instead host tennis matches in their large garden. There isn't all that much of a plot here, but there doesn't need to be. The narrator's hopeless infatuation with the daughter of the family, Micol, feels like a metaphor for the hopeless situation the characters find themselves in --without realizing it.
It's rare to come across good writing, but this is it.
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