The book of your life: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

IThe nature of many great novels is that they create worlds of their own, entire ecosystems that may be completely different from the reader’s experience and yet are so vivid that they become real. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is one of those.

I have never lived in Ferrara, although I have been there a few times, and certainly not in the thirties and forties of the last century and not in the society of the Jews of Ferrara.

And yet I am there as I read. Or at least – perhaps an even more subtle trick – I am in the mind of the anonymous narrator as he almost reluctantly goes through his memories of that time. Memory and imagination are closely intertwined, nowhere more so than in writing. History becomes fiction, fiction becomes history.

This is also the case with Giorgio Bassani’s novel. Blown away by the swirling winds of fascist racial laws, young Jews from Ferrara are pushed like leaves into the city park, the Finzi-Contini Gardens. Rejected by their tennis club, they come up with the idea of ​​reviving the old lawn hidden among the trees. And when you follow Bassani’s narrator with them into the garden, you don’t know whether you are reading fact or fiction, his memory or your own.

You can remember Alberto – the effeminate, brilliant and tragic man; the wise and strict Professor Ermanno; and the beautiful and elusive Micol, whom the narrator loves but never possesses.

But when I first read the book, I was involved in an affair with a certain Micol. The book took my own life and showed me what it might have been like in another place and another time. The moment when the narrator failed to sleep with Micol lingers in the memory as if it were a personal shortcoming. So the characters haunt the reader. They meet in the garden, play tennis, talk, flirt, while around their Eden the harsh wind blows and far away, further than they can hear, the storm of the Holocaust rages.

This is the most indirect Holocaust book. These Jews are wealthy, educated, confident, assimilated. They are part of the fabric of life in Ferrara and have been for centuries. And yet you know. That is the saddest thing of all: you know from the beginning because the narrator knows. You know that they will all be blown away “as light as leaves, as scraps of paper”; but they don’t. And in the end you will be lost, like him.