Word: bassani
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DIED. GIORGIO BASSANI, 84, acclaimed Italian author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), a haunting, semiautobiographical novel of an aristocratic Jewish family's illusory attempts to take refuge from the Fascists in a walled villa; in Rome...
BEHIND THE DOOR by Giorgio Bassani. 150 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...shrill and self-assertive the voices of most novelists sound after listening to Giorgio Bassani tell a story. The former editor of the literary magazine Botteghe Oscure and the discoverer of Giuseppe (The Leopard) Lampedusa, Bassani is best known in the U.S. for his lambent novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis from which the recent Vittoria De Sica film was made. Like Garden, this book is set in the author's native city of Ferrara during the 1930s. Also as in Garden, the narrator of Behind the Door is a wealthy, sensitive young...
...Bassani floats along after his young characters on their Majno bicycles, quietly following the street maps of their days. With unobtrusive skill, he delineates the delicate social patterns that emerge from shared seats and invitations to do homework together. The hierarchical distinctions in his small city are minute. Many of them are noted by the loquacious Pulga. On first viewing the narrator's graceful patrician house, the boy cries, "Twenty rooms! I can imagine what it must cost to heat them." So realistic a thought has never occurred to the narrator, who lives in an insulated world of private...
Garden is a quietly touching, achingly human requiem for the passing of a social order-one of those rare films that can make effective personal drama out of political chaos. Expertly adapted from Giorgio Bassani's autobiographical novel, the story deals with two Jewish families in Ferrara in the late 1930s, when Fascism was cresting all over Italy. The Finzi-Continis are patricians who live in a spacious estate behind high walls, heedless and ever so slightly disdainful of the tide outside that will inexorably engulf them. The other family, never named, is aware of the political upheaval...